"Love locks"—padlocks bearing the names of lovers who have thrown the key away—have become an iconic sight on the bridges of Paris, but campaigners say they're threatening to break the city's infrastructure. Two American women living in the city are spearheading a campaign to get rid of the hundreds of thousands of locks that have turned bridges like the historic Pont des Arts into walls of metal, the Guardian finds. The Pont des Arts now carries hundreds of thousands of locks with a combined weight equivalent to around 20 elephants standing on the pedestrian bridge, CNN notes.
"It's so out of control," says the campaign's co-founder "People are climbing up lampposts to clip locks on, hanging over the bridge to put them on the other side of the rail, risking their lives to attach one. It's a kind of mania. It's not about romance anymore—it's just about saying 'I did it.'" The city council has so far resisted calls to curb the trend—which has now spread to other cities worldwide—but authorities are believed to conduct regular checks to make sure the weight of the locks isn't more than the bridges can bear. (More Paris stories.)
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