2023-08-12 03:00:00
Gianluigi Paragone August 12, 2023
Twenty-four thousand fines in one month. And surely someone, in those thirty days, will have caught more than one. The act of sabotage against the speed camera placed in the municipality of Cadoneghe in Veneto along a provincial road is a desperate gesture by those who will now undergo politically correct media trials because certain things are not done. Here, having said that “certain things are not done” we could even go further and say that these tools have nothing to do with prevention and various blablas but are the most practiced method by mayors to raise cash. Anyone who denies it is out of touch with reality. And he is a liar.
By now speed cameras and traffic auxiliaries unleashed to check who goes wrong in the paid parking for a few minutes are so much a part of the budgets that every year the estimate of fines for infringements grows more and more. The highway code, among other things, provides that part of those fines should serve for the safety of citizens and I don’t know that the chasms in the streets are covered in a workmanlike manner (which does not always mean a pouring of cement as a patch ) or that public lighting is enhanced. So – I repeat – the mayors are making money using the trawling method.
INJUSTICE AND DUTY
Were they right to blow up the speed camera? Let’s say we respond with Brecht (whose aphorism “What is robbing a bank compared to founding a bank” is already famous): «When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes a duty». Well, do the process also to the immense German playwright. Fines with speed cameras are an injustice, they are legalized protection money. In Cagli, a small town in the Marche region, with its three million fines, the Municipality collects as much as Bologna; Milan, on the other hand, always exaggerates: 151 million euros in a year (and periodically increases the public transport ticket). It’s clear that ants in their own small way get pissed off because you can’t work to pay in addition to taxes, even this mountain of fines.
I would add – and this is also an element that should not be underestimated – that in the greed of goodness and good citizenship (because obviously this state extortion is well dressed with the best intentions) the local authorities compete to devise money-catching tricks, such as placing television cameras even on the traffic light line or reduce the yellow time, or set up 30 km/h limits, or even more speed cameras on the same road course so with the same driving method you get two or three fines. Understand well that then people can’t stand it anymore and cheer for the Corsair who performs the rebellious act. And that perhaps due to the sanctions it was seen either to take away the license or to put the jaws on the car for non-payment.
BUREAUCRACY
Thus we arrive at the madness of the collection process: do we want to talk about it? Notifications that do not arrive or that for some reason escape (the PA claims that we must live always thinking of its bureaucracy first than the rest) trigger processes that would have indulged Ennio Flaiano’s Martian in a tour not only in Rome. Obviously, however, all this will not help our corsair from Cadoneghe at the stake that the Buoni are setting up. So excuse us if, in the Brechtian way, we sympathize with him.
#blow #speed #camera #Libero #Quotidiano