Big Brother In The Bus Lane

A simple white envelope landed on the doormat on Monday.  Plain, ordinary, with no post mark and no return address, just the words 'Royal Mail, Postage Paid' in the top right corner. What's this? I wondered, intrigued. It was addressed to me personally, so not junk mail in all probability, but one thing I have learned over the years is that unexpected mail is rarely good news. Sometimes not news at all, often unimportant news, but frequently annoying or bad news. I slit the envelope open and pulled out...a Penalty Charge Notice (PCN). Apparently I had driven in a bus lane. I peered at the CCTV photos and recognised with a sigh of resignation, that yes indeed, I had driven in a bus lane, for all of fifty feet or so, approaching a set of traffic lights at which I wanted to be in the inside lane. There had been no bus in the bus lane, in front or behind me, I was not causing an obstruction nor inconvenience by doing so, if anything I was speeding the traffic flow by not clogging up the outside lane, but nonetheless I had driven in the bus lane...for fifty feet.

*Sigh* That's me, entering the bus lane.

According to the AA, fines for motorists using bus lanes have outstripped parking tickets as the main cause of complaints from drivers. One such bus lane, in Lambeth, generates over £1 million in income for the local council every year. Many drivers are fooled by worn road markings and poor signage of bus lanes, while the Lambeth junction is said to be difficult to negotiate without driving in the bus lane. There is a common perception that bus lane cameras, speed cameras and other cameras that regularly record drivers committing some sort of motoring violation have more to do with income generation than improving road safety or traffic flow. With these fines going into local authority coffers at a time when central government grants are being cut and councils find themselves under increasing financial pressure, it is easy to see why.

This Daily Mail graphic shows revenue generated by just ten traffic enforcement cameras in 2013

I toyed with the idea of appealing against the PCN, but decided that there was little or no point, after all I had no real grounds other than requesting that common sense be applied, which is no defence at all. Had I appealed on the grounds that it was only fifty feet, there were no buses and that I was actually improving traffic flow, the reply would simply have been that I was in a bus lane, ergo I was committing an offense.  No doubt my PCN was generated from the image taken from the camera mounted on the lamp post by an automated system, and that my fine having been paid online, the record will be updated by an automated system and me apart, no human will ever be aware of the matter (except you, dear reader). That being the case, there was no possibility of a human operator using any discretion and saying that while technically an offense occurred, there was no harm done. I recall, a number of years ago when motorcycles in London were not allowed to use bus lanes, seeing a motorcyclist stopped by a policeman in Aldgate and asked, "So this is a bus, then is it?" with that particularly sarcastic tone that is undoubtedly taught at Hendon Police College from day one. I am fairly confident that the police officer used his discretion and sent the rider on his way with a flea in his ear but no more; CCTV cameras however have no more discretion than a washing machine does.

In twenty three years of motoring (I was a late starter, only passing my test in 1992) I have picked up five fines. The first was for parking on a double yellow line and was a bit of a calculated risk on my part, although I was by no means the only person parked on that particular stretch of road. I imagine that the traffic warden had writer's cramp by the time he finished his shift. I have to hold my hands up to that one. Number two, however was infuriating to say the least. Driving into a space in a car park as it was just being vacated by another motorist, I was annoyed to return to the car later to find a parking ticket. It was one of those car parks with poorly marked bays as it was largely gravel, with white lines barely a foot long indicating the spaces. My infraction was to have parked over two spaces. My defence was that one of the spaces was largely occupied by a large bush making parking entirely in that bay physically impossible; it didn't wash and I had to pay.

I received a ticket for doing 37mph in a 30mph zone and again, have no defence except that it was one of those maddening stretches of road (the A12 in Suffolk) where the speed limit jumps from 30 to 40 to National Speed Limit (NSL), then back down to 30 via 40 then back up to NSL through 40 mph. I genuinely thought that the limit was 40 when I was clocked; obviously I was mistaken. I went on a Speed Awareness Course as an alternative to the points on my licence; I still had to pay the fine, although they call it a course fee. Then there was parking partially on the pavement, which is fairly common round my way; in fact in some roads, even though there are no formally marked bays, it is the norm. That isn't to say it is allowed and the ubiquitous CCTV camera picked it up.

There are twenty different types of traffic enforcement cameras in the UK; there are somewhere in the region of 5.5 million CCTV cameras of all types (not just for traffic enforcement) of which 6,000 are speed cameras.  Look around and you are never far from a CCTV camera of some kind, so I suppose that PCN's are an almost inevitable consequence of driving.  Eventually you will infringe some traffic regulation or another and get one in the post.

A positively Orwellian London Transport poster from 2002

Oh, some people don't get them. You know the sort, they will boast that they have forty years of unblemished driving behind them. What they actually mean is they have forty years of never being caught behind them. With the number of cameras in the UK, that won't last long.

Mind how you go.