Stop the rot

Mr Mustard expects that most drivers/residents will know the Golders Green station area as will many coach travellers as it is a stop on some long distance National Express journeys (e.g. Manchester to London). Here is an aerial view

Mr Mustard didn't realise when he snipped the image but there is a handily placed bus to demonstrate bus scale, Mr Mustard having drawn a line to show a gap of 10.9m into which a bus is meant to fit at the lights if going south down the Finchley Road and navigating around the island with the clock on it.

Why is Mr Mustard writing about this subject? It is because of this tribunal decision.

Mr Mustard looked up the coach in question to find it is a Mercedes Benz Tourismo and longer than the gap between the traffic lights and the yellow box it was going over.

Thus, as Mr Thacker said, it is impossible to not overhang the yellow box.

As the adjudicator pointed out the stop was due to red traffic lights not due to a stationary vehicle so absolutely no contravention had occurred and this behaviour is, in the words of regular reader Fraser 'ruthless, venal and rapacious' and Mr Mustard would add stupid and procedurally unfair.

It is hard enough to safely drive a coach through London especially around busy junctions without having to worry if you might get wrongly ticketed by some numpty at NSL who doesn't know the rules and thinks that because the computer controlled cctv has selected this as a possible contravention, that it must be so. In fact, two people are meant to watch the cctv extracts before pressing the PCN button but Mr Mustard suspects that the task is either not being performed or not diligently or with any real thought.

Mr Mustard is going to send this case to the relevant labour councillor who can start to bring some common sense and some law abiding behaviour to the parking / PCN department.

The end (or at least perhaps the beginning of it for revenue raising).
 

Box junctions are tough on buses & lorries

To get a bus across a box junction without stopping and into a long enough space on the other side is tricky as smaller nimbler traffic, cars, can fill the empty space as soon as 5m is available beyond the box whereas a double decker bus needs at least 15m so the bus can sit there in lane 2 at the location in question

(cars in lane 1 should go left but some will go straight on) whilst those rowed up in lane 3 can 'steal' the 5m space one at a time and leave the bus unable to proceed legally.

It seems from the adjudicators decision above that in this case the bus driver entered when he did have room to exit so whatever happened next he could not be in contravention, no matter why and for how long he stopped. The council don't seem to understand this and blindly follow the assumption that if the computer thought it was a contravention, it must be one.

Whilst the rules of the road apply equally to buses and lorries, there needs to be some common sense applied for larger vehicles, and generally across London there is as Mr Mustard rarely sees bus companies taken to the tribunal for being stopped in a box junction. This is Barnet though, recently described to Mr Mustard in the following terms:

The overwhelming impression is that Barnet see every PCN as sacrosanct and that to cancel one is a personal defeat.

Mr Mustard knows that Barnet Council read & consider his tweets & blogs so maybe someone in management, with a less rigid approach, will apply the brakes to such cases in the future.

The council seem unable to link the way they behave in relentlessly pursuing unmeritorious PCNs with the poor public perception of the department in surveys. Doh!

Yours frugally

Mr Mustard

a reminder of how to approach safely navigating, in financial terms, a box junction 
http://lbbspending.blogspot.com/2016/06/yellowboxfever.html