A victim of fine

Sometimes I think it would be easier if the government deducted a set amount from my bank account every month to cover ‘incidental stealth taxes’.

Sometimes I think it would be easier if the government deducted a set amount from my bank account every month to cover ‘incidental stealth taxes’.

I’ve noticed that it is less painful to pay your gas and electricity bills by direct debit, so I’m thinking some sort of ‘minor traffic infringements’ standing order might be a good way to proceed. HM Gov and I could arrive at an estimated figure of what I, as a law-abiding citizen, inevitably manage to rack up in fines each year — forgotten congestion charges, parking at my local supermarket for a second longer than permitted, and so on — and come to an agreed monthly amount to spread the cost evenly throughout the year. Some sort of ‘pay as you go’ facility is clearly needed because there are now so many ways of falling foul of the law without knowing it that it is quite impossible to avoid doing the wrong thing. I’ve just been fined, for example, for committing such a puny, pathetic, paltry, fleeting, insignificant, meaningless traffic offence that I have quite given up on the hope that I will ever leave my house in my car without breaking the law.

It happened on Battersea Bridge Road. There I was in my little Peugeot, stuck in the interminable queue that has been piling up there since they closed Albert Bridge, forcing the excess traffic to use Battersea Bridge as an alternative route into town.

After a while, my car reached the traffic lights a few hundred yards from the river but the slowly moving pile-up in front meant that it was impossible to judge whether I would make it through without getting stuck in the middle. The traffic moved a little, I made a split second judgment that on balance I would get through and I drove forward. No sooner had I done so than the traffic ground to a halt in front of me and — shock horror — I got stuck in a yellow box.

I pulled right to the very edge of it, and indeed was almost out of it, with just my back wheels stuck a few inches inside it. I must have been like that, with my tyres a few miserable inches inside a yellow box, for about three seconds when the queue started moving again and I drove off. A few days later, the letter from Transport for London arrived. ‘Notice is hereby served to the owner of vehicle registration…in Battersea Bridge Road…that the following contravention was being or had been committed. Contravention code: 31. Contravention description: entering and stopping in a box junction when prohibited. A penalty of £120 is payable…’ Or £180 if I didn’t pay up or dared to make representations. Then in less bold type they admitted that now they had frightened me enough, they would in fact accept £60 if I paid up quick enough. Remind you of anything? A street robber is what it reminds me of. ‘Give us the cash, you slag, come on!’ ‘Aggggh, I haven’t got anything, only a few quid.’ ‘All right, we’ll take that, come on, come on! And don’t go squealing or we’ll come after you for more!’

So I paid up my few quid immediately to get them off my back and went off to lick my wounds and recover from the ordeal of being mugged …sorry, fined.

A few days later, I was driving along the same road and came to the same set of traffic lights. This time I waited for three light changes until I felt brave enough to go through. Being a victim of crime, sorry, fine, does this to you. I couldn’t have felt more terrified than if an armed thug was waiting for me behind a lamp post. I darted over and only just made it through the box, my heart thumping in my chest.

But when I looked in my rear-view mirror, the car behind me had got stuck. As I sat in the queue for the bridge, I watched what was going on at that box junction. With every single light change, a car got stuck. I did the maths quickly in my head. If those lights change every minute, and one car gets helplessly trapped on the edge of that box every change, and if every car is fined at least £60, that box junction is making Transport for London £86,400 a day! That’s just one box junction, in one road in London.

But I’m not leaving it to my flaky estimates. I’ve put in a Freedom of Information request asking TfL for their official figures for the fines levied there. I will keep you posted. In the meantime, think outside the box. Seriously. Never, never do anything inside the box. Not even for a second.

Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.