On a winter’s day in 2024, in a suburban town near Padua, Italy, commuters awoke to a surprise: a speed camera, hacked down by an angle grinder, bearing the message “Fleximan is coming."
After dozens of copycat speed camera attacks, the name Fleximan has achieved a kind of mythic status in Italy.
“He was considered a local hero,” said Tom Roper, an English school owner who has lived in the region for 15 years. “I had people calling me, asking, ‘Do you know Fleximan?’”
But the flashiness of Fleximan’s vigilante actions hide a surprisingly broad consensus, across Europe, that speed cameras not only work but are widely desired.
“If you ask citizens, support for enforcement is quite high,” said Jenny Carson, a project manager at the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC), based in Brussels, Belgium. “People want speeds to be reduced.”
Italy, home to more than 10,000 active speed cameras — the most in all of Europe — is proof of this trend.
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