Which brings me to stopping in yellow boxes on road junctions. My family and I have escaped indiscretions in these so far, but let’s give it time. Perhaps we will have the misfortune to go near England’s most notorious, a camera-monitored one in Kingston upon Thames, which raked in £450,000 in fines in just eight months last year.
Any road layout that’s so hard for drivers to comply with that it earns £2000 a day in fines must surely by definition be badly designed, but Kingston Borough Council is so far refusing to budge. Because of the safety and congestion implications? If only.
In the minutes of a special meeting convened last month to discuss the junction, the council recorded the part it should probably have left unsaid: “Whilst the raising of revenue from enforcement is not the objective, there is a financial implication to the council if there is a change to the current arrangement. The council needs to be mindful of the impact that this would have on the revenue income streams that help to balance the budget.”
In other words, this badly designed road layout should remain badly designed, because it pays.
How many conversations go on like this that we’re not privy to, I wonder? Those that would infuriate us all if their participants were also daft enough to admit out loud that they’d had them?
What councils and politicians at all levels need to realise is that this stuff matters. “Trust and confidence in Britain’s system of government is at a record low,” found the National Centre for Social Research in 2024, and when you read those minutes you can understand why.
Patience and tolerance with rule makers’ mistakes is thin, the UK is on its sixth prime minister in a decade and, as I write, newspapers are discussing whether there will be a seventh – a rate of management turnover that would be embarrassing for a football club, let alone a democracy of 70 million people.
There might be a way to reverse this, to rebuild a bit of faith in those who govern us but it won’t manifest unless a tolerance of errors starts to flow both ways.