Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Conspiracy theorists are cutting down the sensors that time UK traffic lights
Attacks on the detector units mounted above signal heads have been reported in Devon, Cambridge, Lincolnshire and County Durham, by people who believe the units are weapons capable of causing cancer and dementia.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Footage posted after an incident on 28 August showed an older woman at the top of an extendable ladder in Ilfracombe, Devon, chopping at wires on a set of traffic lights while others filmed and encouraged her.
- A woman in her 60s and a man in his 70s were later arrested and bailed on suspicion of criminal damage and causing danger to road users.
- Police in Cambridge appealed for information about a suspect in May after nearly 200 traffic detector units were damaged.
- In Sleaford, Lincolnshire, 10 units were vandalised in a week that same month, and the council described the conspiracy claims as ridiculous.
- In County Durham, a pensioner is facing trial after allegedly damaging units on eight sets of traffic lights.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- exposure Hand tools and a domestic ladder were enough to disable a unit in daylight. Every detector on every signal pole is in scope.
- cost The sensors generally go in at junctions with a history of flow problems, often at residents' request. Each cut unit takes adaptive signal timing away from the street that asked for it.
- constraint The only lever on show so far is prosecution: deterrence runs through police time and court dates, and the hardware stays exactly as reachable as it was.
- precedent Anyone maintaining the estate can see the target selection in advance. Supporters have publicly named Bideford and Barnstaple as the next towns.
Two devices sit on a modern set of traffic lights, and only the upper one is being cut. Susan Grant-Muller, a professor of technologies and informatics at the University of Leeds's Institute for Transport Studies, said activists generally leave the red, amber and green heads alone and go for the sensors mounted above them. Those sensors monitor vehicle volume and in some cases pedestrian numbers, so the lights can be phased to help traffic flow [11]. She finds the hostility puzzling because "this technology, in its most basic form, has been around since the late 70s" [10]. In Ilfracombe the tool was a small pair of pliers [1]. "Just cut the wires," said one man behind the camera [2].
The volume is what maintenance budgets have to cover. Cambridge and Sleaford together account for at least 210 damaged detector units in a single month [20].
The published record leaves the question of organisation open. The Guardian reports that activists claiming affiliation to the movement previously targeted Ulez cameras in London, resentful at the surveillance and the emission zone charges, and that there have been sporadic attacks on 5G masts tied to Covid theories [6]. Claiming affiliation and having a command structure are two different things. What the four areas visibly share is a target description and a method, republished each time someone films the job [1].
The group calling itself Blade Runners holds that the scanners conceal "phased array electronic assault weapons" capable of mass surveillance and of causing cancer, dementia and sudden death [5]. Grant-Muller said "The cameras aren't recording any personal information at all", and that the units "just detect that there is something there, a car or person, and the length of the queue that people are waiting in" [12][13]. Tanya Braun, director of external affairs at Living Streets, said "Better monitoring technology improves pedestrian safety at traffic lights and crossings" [15].
Clare Birchall, a professor of contemporary culture at King's College London, places the scanner theories inside a super-conspiracy that believers call "the great reset" [16]. "These super-conspiracies draw all sorts of different things together to give some kind of shape to a whole bunch of different anxieties and fears," Birchall said [17]. She said people are "so disenfranchised when it comes to the collection of our data or what happens to that" [19].
The decisions in front of a highway authority this quarter are unglamorous: mounting height, how quickly a dead unit is noticed, how fast it is replaced. Then there is whether the crew replacing it should expect to be filmed. None of the four areas has published a repair cost. The longer question is which class of hardware inherits the theory next, and Birchall's account of current anxieties already contains a candidate: "Lots of people are worried about datacentres," she said [18].
What to watch
- The County Durham trial. It would be the first test of whether prosecution registers with the supporter pages.
- Whether any highway authority publishes replacement counts or repair costs for damaged detector units.
- Whether charges follow the Ilfracombe bail, or the file is dropped.