Now see this
Since Hammersmith & Fulham Council installed cameras at their yellow box junctions, one of them generated £2.7 million pounds from drivers in just one year.
Yellow boxes are not new and the truth is the drivers shouldn't need punitive measures to keep junctions clear. But then, living in a rural area where the living is easy, I daily see drivers joining a queue of stationary traffic and ignoring the side turning, often with drivers patiently awaiting an opportunity to pull out and make their turn only to be penned where they are by pure thoughtlessness and inconsideration. It is very annoying but the average driver is just that. So yes these boxes are a necessary evil. However for most of their existence, about 50 years, they have been a resounding success where the police would use discretion with drivers depending on the circumstances of the incident. Now it seems that no discretion is being applied at all.
As usual, the justification is based on the assumption that all drivers are deliberately disobedient and drive for fun. This couldn't be further from the truth. There is nothing fun about running motor vehicles and nor is it a matter of choice either. If people weren't driving the economy would collapse over-night. The deliberate miscreants can be weeded out by simply waiting for three or four repeat performances before issuing a ticket can't they? Why not? So if evidence were needed that this is about raising vast amounts of cash for greedy councils here it is. Why not reserve tickets for the regulars? And these cameras need only be switched on occasionally to create the deterrent effect too. So here is even more evidence that this is not primarily about traffic flow at all.
Just as with speed cameras, we have observed that if a site is generating a high ticket rate then 1) The object isn't being achieved and 2) It is evidence of a layout problem (In the case of yellow box junctions, a traffic light phase issue too). If these were thousands of accidents would the authorities just keep snapping cameras at them or find out why?
We have already noted how much the councils are now raking in by ignoring precedents in their yellow line operations now their beady eyes are on box junctions.
Is there a hidden agenda? Peter Box of Newcastle's yellow cash box scheme says that the money will go to fixing potholes etc. And here maybe the answer to all this. In January of 2011 we predicted UK's Third World Roads to stay.
It's absolutely obvious to us that something has gone badly wrong with our roads. Roads simply didn't crumble and break up in winters past. Those of the Eastern Seaboard of the USA don't do it. Nor those in Alaska, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe either. So our guess is that councils, no doubt believing in global warming, have been laying surfaces more suited to the Mediterranean than the Arctic. These substandard unfit for purpose surfaces would've saved councils a fortune in road maintenance. If so, what a disaster for the UK.
Lincolnshire alone needs £300,000,000 to put the matter right and they are probably still basing that on the cost of the current faulty system. Is it just a coincidence then that Central Government, unable to raise this in direct taxation, has literally handed local local councils a massive cash injection of what amounts to indirect taxes to rebuild our infrastructure and put right their mistakes? We may well be wrong about that but the fact remains someone has to fix our roads and who better to get the money from but UK's supine drivers?
Drivers can stop all this by voting against any councillor who supports blanket driver punishment.
