This is sort of cool and sort of awful. Jozi thieves have stripped about 400 ‘high-tech traffic lights’ of their sim cards, modems and GPS systems, using the sim cards to make unlimited free phone calls. It will cost about R8,8 million to replace these fancy, legitimately robot-like traffic lights. Regular GPS-free traffic lights are unaffected.

See, this is distinct from the December 2010 incidents of traffic lights being uprooted and sold for scrap metal because it suggests that somebody – the unknown, unidentified ‘thieves’ – knows that the fancy, unnecessary new traffic lights were equipped with sim cards, GPS systems and so forth, and that said systems could be exploited. Which is at once very clever and a little worrying.

Says Johannesburg Road Agency (JRA) spokesperson Thulani Makhubela:

“The JRA has been severely affected with this crime and this now means we have to fork out more money on something that we should not have spent a cent on.
…
“We don’t know who is involved but we hope to get to the bottom of it.”

[Joburg.org.]
[Image sourced under Creative Commons from mister-e’s photostream]