After part of Paris’ Pont Des Arts bridge rail broke under the sheer weight of love – that is love sealed with a Love Lock – the city of Paris had to seriously consider how to get tourists to stop infesting literally every bridge in Paris – Pont des Arts, le Pont Neuf, and the Pont Saint-Louis being among the most popular.
Our bridges can no longer withstand your gestures of love. Use #lovewithoutlocks to spread the word ! pic.twitter.com/Y1JxUI9GOA
— Paris (@Paris) August 22, 2014
Their solution, seen above, was to promote the idea that taking Selfies – equally as harmful to society, but with a signficiantly smaller physical footprint – on Paris bridges was a better way to immortalize your love. The #LovewithoutLocks is receiving mixed reviews, but it’s clearly a necessary change. The city of Paris hires workers full-time to spend their days cutting off those immortal locks (what? you never noticed that no lock dates back beyond a few months?), and the river bed of the seine is littered with hundreds of thousands of keys, romantically discarded in an effort to say “our love is as immortal as polution.”
For now, it appears that the city of Paris is going to see this campaign through – while Paris locksmiths might see a decline in revenue in the coming year, the overall economic impact will be positive, and there are plenty of other ways to destroy the planet in order to show how strong your love is: airplane messages in the sky or rare animal furs will surely do the trick.