TOM UTLEY: My sainted wife and I hadn’t the foggiest it was suddenly forbidden to drive down the road we’ve used for 35 years – until the fines began piling up
Every December in years gone by, my wife and I would look forward to the daily arrival of the postman, bearing another batch of Christmas cards to cheer up the house and bring news and good wishes from family and friends. This year, we’ve come to dread it.
This is not because our annual crop of cards is looking leaner than ever, although that’s certainly the case – and hardly surprising, as I remarked last week, since the price of stamps has shot up to an exorbitant 75p for the second-class post, and £1.25 for first.
No, we dread the postie’s arrival because among this year’s cards, he has taken to delivering penalty-charge notices from our local council, demanding £65 if we pay immediately, or £130 if we delay payment for more than 14 days.
All right, so far this month we’ve received only two, for separate driving offences one or other of us apparently committed on the same local road in November, under newly imposed regulations.
That’s £130 we’ve had to cough up so far, in the run-up to Christmas (and it would have been £260, of course, if we’d been too poor to pay up immediately).
London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) is adding £12.50 per day to the cost of every trip in an older vehicle
Enough to say that Scrooge is alive and well, and setting the rules for motoring penalties at Labour-run Lambeth Council in South London.
As for which of us was driving at the time of those offences all those weeks ago, I have no idea, because the photographs displayed on the penalty notices throw no light on the matter.
However, they clearly show our car on the road at a time when the new restrictions were in force. This means that one of us must be guilty, since no one else drives it.
Mrs U, bless her heart, says she thinks it was probably her, on both occasions – although, strictly between you and me, I reckon it may well have been me.
Just don’t tell her I said so, and bring me tumbling down from my rare visit to the moral high ground.
Whichever of us was guilty, however, our worry is that since both of us were unaware of the new regulations until the first penalty notice arrived this month, two weeks after our car was caught on camera for the first time, there’s no telling how many more fines we may have incurred during the fortnight it took the council to alert us through the sluggish Christmas post.
What both of us had failed to notice was a new road sign, nestling in a forest of six others at the entrance to the road in question, just down the hill from ours. Partially obscured by signs announcing a 20mph speed limit and a 7.5-ton restriction on vans and lorries ‘except for loading’, it reads: ‘Pedestrian and cycle zone, Mon-Fri, 8.15-9.15am, 2.45–3.45pm. Except permit holders LS8.’
Another, much smaller notice at the base of the same pole reads: ‘School Streets are only enforced during school term times. To find out the Lambeth schools term times, please scan the QR code.’
With buses sometimes taking almost an hour to pass two stops, our one remaining resident son is having to get up ever earlier in the morning to reach the school where he teaches in time for lessons
This notice also gives a web address for checking the term times, for the benefit of those who are unable to scan the code.
Our problem arose because we know that road so well. We’d been driving up and down it at all times of day, at least once or twice daily since we moved into our present house some 35 years ago. Never before had it been against the rules to do so.
Certainly, we knew about that 20mph limit, which has been in force for quite a while. We also knew there was a primary school in that road, which is why we’ve always been careful to look out for stray nippers as we’ve driven along it.
But it was only when the first penalty notice arrived that we realised the rules had changed. Now I see that instead of turning left into that fateful road from the High Street, looking out for pedestrians as usual, whichever of us was driving should have studied all the instructions on those new signs.
Then we should have checked our watches for the time, and scanned that QR code or logged on to the website for the dates of Lambeth school terms — although it beats me how motorists are supposed to do this, since it’s illegal to use a mobile phone at the wheel.
If only we’d gone through all that palaver, holding up the traffic on the High Street in the process, we would have realised that it had suddenly become illegal to use the road at the beginning or end of the school day. Thus, we would have saved ourselves £130, and counting.
Do other motorists remember those happy days when a one-word road sign saying ‘School’ was deemed sufficient to warn us to keep alert, with no need for temporary road closures or draconian fines to back it up?
But, of course, Lambeth Council’s decision to impose the new restrictions has precious little to do with any sudden concern for the safety of vulnerable children, as it would have us believe.
This latest temporary road closure is only the latest in a series of maddening anti-motorist measures that have been making life increasingly difficult in my neck of the woods
No, in common with other councils all over the country – particularly those under Labour or Lib Dem control, though the Conservatives are guilty, too – the people who run them regard motorists as milch cows to finance their profligate spending.
If we’re rich enough to run a motor vehicle, they reckon, then we can surely afford to pay for their LGBT-awareness workshops, or whatever fatuous projects at which they choose to spray the public’s money. So the more meddlesome rules they introduce, the more juicy charges and penalties they can exact from drivers unlucky enough to fall foul of them.
Indeed, this latest temporary road closure is only the latest in a series of maddening anti-motorist measures that have been making life increasingly difficult in my neck of the woods, not only for businesses and individuals who depend on their vehicles, but for everyone else as well.
First there was London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez), which is adding £12.50 per day to the cost of every trip in an older vehicle. That’s on top of the £15 daily charge for those who venture into the capital’s congestion zone.
Then there was Lambeth’s disastrous decision, which I complained about here only a few weeks ago, to set up a Low Traffic Neighbourhood in the area where one of Mrs U’s sisters lives, just down the road from our house.
This has had so many pernicious effects that I hardly know where to begin. It has caused toxic gridlock on boundary roads, bringing buses and emergency vehicles to a standstill, increasing pollution and leading delivery drivers to boycott the whole area.
With buses sometimes taking almost an hour to pass two stops, our one remaining resident son is having to get up ever earlier in the morning to reach the school where he teaches in time for lessons.
Add the delays caused by the spread of (often empty) cycle lanes, and it’s no wonder that London bus drivers are threatening to strike over the daily misery they now have to endure.
But I hate to be gloomy at Christmas. So I’ll end on an optimistic note.
This week, Manchester’s ambitious mayor Andy Burnham, the former Labour Health Secretary and Thunderbirds puppet lookalike, announced that he will not be following his London counterpart’s lead in imposing Ulez charges. Ever sensitive to the way the political wind is blowing, he knows better than to risk the massive unpopularity of Mr Khan’s scheme.
In the same week, Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford has announced his decision to stand down, amid huge public anger over his imposition of 20mph limits throughout Wales.
Meanwhile, hostility to my local Low Traffic Neighbourhood has become so heated and well-organised that it’s said Lambeth Council may now scrap it, before it costs Labour any more support.
Is it too much to hope that politicians are coming to realise there are plenty of votes to be lost in the New Year, and none to be gained, by making life hell for the motorists?
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