Bluff and nonsense in Redbridge

A double decker bus weighs between 11 and 14 metric tonnes. Will you therefore play chicken with it when two lanes go into one and you might end up impaled on a traffic island and traffic light? No, nor would Mr Mustard.

Miss Careful (not her real name) came to Mr Mustard for help as she had been sent a PCN for stopping in a box junction. She did stop, but to avoid being squashed and possibly killed. Redbridge Council have a video of the way in which she crossed the box which clearly confirms the facts. In order to preserve secrecy Mr Mustard is just going to give you 5 stills from the cctv, in time order, from which you can see what happened.

Where is the car? You may well ask, masked by the bus.

The car still isn't visible

Now, finally you can see the car

In this frame you can see that the car has sensibly given way to the bus

Onwards we all go

Mr Mustard made the representations as follows and set out the law to save the council the bother of looking it up:

Lots of representations get rejected for two reasons. The first is that the person considering the matter doesn't know what they are doing. The second is that many recipients of rejections worry about the discount, which Mr Mustard doesn't as he is aiming to pay nothing at all, and meekly pay up if knocked back. Mr Mustard is not meek.

An uninformed rejection duly arrived:

The exit probably was clear on entry but the cctv doesn't show it and it does clearly show bullying behaviour by the bus and that the stop was not caused by a stationary vehicle.

Mr Mustard ploughed on, much like the bus, an unstoppable force. He started an Appeal to the tribunal. Redbridge threw in the towel because they could see they were going to lose.

It shouldn't be like this.

The PCN should never have been sent. If the car was leased the PCN might have been paid by the lease company which would penalise an innocent driver.

The Notice of Rejection should never have been sent as it didn't impartially consider the facts.

The message for motorists is that if you think you are correct you should ignore the discount and continue to the tribunal stage where you will get a fair hearing from an adjudicator who does not seek to benefit from a refusal, as councils do.

The end.