Missing Bristol bus gate sign meant '20 days of fines are illegal'

An anti-bus gate campaigner has claimed the city council ‘illegally’ issued more than a thousand penalty charge notices for almost three weeks this month, because the sign warning drivers had been knocked over and then removed.

Matt Sanders, who has been running a one-man campaign against the bus gate on Cumberland Road since the council began catching and fining drivers at the start of this year, has called on the council to cancel all the penalty charge notices issued to drivers, and cancel any payments they have already received for the 20-day period between October 25 and November 13.

On October 25, the sign warning drivers preparing to turn left out of Gas Ferry Road onto Cumberland Road that they will be turning into a bus gate, was knocked over and left at an acute angle to the pavement. It was swiftly removed by the council because it was a potential danger to people walking on the pavement, and not replaced until almost three weeks later, on November 13.

Mr Sanders said he estimates that, going by the current October rate of the bus gate camera on Cumberland Road catching 109 drivers every day, more than 2,000 drivers will have been clocked breaching the bus gate in that period. A large proportion of them will have been drivers exiting Gas Ferry Road - where the SS Great Britain and its car park, Aardman Animation and the Floating Harbour are - who turned left with no sign there at all to warn them.

The signage there has been the subject of an ongoing legal battle between Mr Sanders and the city council. He has mounted appeals to the Traffic Penalty Tribunal on behalf of drivers who had visited the SS Great Britain via Cumberland Road from the east, and then been fined for taking the same route back out again, without spotting the sign for the bus gate which prevents that.

Mr Sanders asked the man in charge of transport and the roads in Bristol, the chair of the transport committee Cllr Ed Plowden (Green, Windmill Hill), about it at the city council’s full council meeting on November 12. “The warning sign at the end of Gas Ferry Road, which has been key to a lot of the cases the council lost - the adjudicators said it was vital to the enforcement of the bus gate - was knocked down under mysterious circumstances on October 28,” he told the council meeting.

“The council failed to repair it for two weeks and has now removed it altogether, so there is currently no sign at the junction. If you are enforcing restrictions, there has to be information available to persons using the road by the traffic signs. There’s currently no traffic sign at that junction,” he said. “Can you reassure us that the council is not enforcing penalty charge notices relating to this period of at least two and a half weeks so far where the sign has been compromised and is now missing, and that would obviously be an illegal breach of the local authority’s traffic orders regulations 1996?” he asked Cllr Plowden.

The transport chair replied: “It’s been made safe, the new post is going in tomorrow. We have a duty to make sure no one gets hurt as far as possible. A sign will be put on it very quickly after that.”

The sign was replaced the next day, Wednesday, November 13, but the question of whether the council would still be sending fines to drivers who had breached the bus gate has not been answered. Mr Sanders said drivers have still been fined. While the turning from Gas Ferry Road is right next to the bus gate, the bus gate cameras and systems are not able to tell whether a driver has approached from Cumberland Road or turned into it from Gas Ferry Road, and the council has the choice of either turning off the camera for all drivers while one sign on a side road is missing, or looking favourably on drivers who appeal against their fines and say they came from Gas Ferry Road and didn't see any signs.

Mr Sanders said that continuing to operate the bus gate camera and send out PCNs, knowing the sign was missing, was 'illegal'. “The bottom line is that for 20 days the sign was compromised and then missing,” said Mr Sanders. “Therefore, the council had no right to issue penalty charge notices, but it has indeed continued to issue PCNs during this time, so the council has knowingly contravened the law,” he added.

Mr Sanders told the council meeting that the controversial bus gate was on course to be the most prolific in the UK by the end of 2024, with motorists caught driving through it almost 60,000 times already this year. He said this showed it was ‘ineffective’, but Cllr Plowden disagreed.

“I don’t think that a high level of PCNs shows that it’s not effective,” he said. “In fact the reason we put that in was because we wanted to improve air quality, and air quality has significantly improved following the introduction of bus gates. There was a report in January from the previous mayor that showed that we’ve made improvements to Clean Air across the piece,” he added.

“We’ve seen a significant drop off (in the number of drivers caught), so the latest figures we’re looking at around 3,800 in the last month compared with a much higher number earlier this year. So things are getting better,” he said.

Cllr Plowden played down the number of times the council had lost tribunal cases, and said that after several were lost relating to the sign at Gas Ferry Road, it was improved. “We have put a number of additional signs in, there was particularly one judgement that suggested that an additional sign needed to be done on Gas Ferry Road, and it was supplemented with an additional yellow sign. An advance warning sign was then added on the near side and we’ve subsequently added the additional sign on the other side of the road.

“Out of 118 (appeals) that have gone to the Traffic Penalty Tribunal on this particular bus gate, we’ve lost 14. All of those have said that this is not a general finding, but this is a specific finding to a specific case,” he added.