Government Plan Fails Hard: Shocking  

Our town has recently had some construction in the city centre, with some new roads added that lead away from the main high street and force cars to loop around an extra five miles just to leave the town centre.

For years, there has been a through road that people use to cut through. It’s located around the back entrance of some of the larger shops. It has two lanes with traffic lights on the end. It is a very popular road as it cuts the journey through town down by about ten minutes in traffic.

My store was located on the through road, and the delivery area where employees parked their cars led directly to the road.

After construction, there were new signs on all of the roads that stated a height restriction on vehicles because of “emissions.” This was the only sign located on the road.

After a week of work, I came home to seven envelopes with a £75 fine and a photo of my car leaving work. I was naturally livid, because there was no signage. I had full right to be there as I worked on the road and even had a parking pass fully displayed in all of the photos.

It all seemed like a mess, so I appealed the ticket and, luckily, did not have to pay.

I mentioned it to some friends and they had all been ticketed. They had appealed and gotten let off their tickets, too.

The next week, the local paper showed the road in question and explained how the local council had issued fines totalling almost one-million pounds over the first month of the restrictions. Said restrictions were not legally enforceable because there was no signage to state that cars couldn’t drive on the road. It also mentioned that the height restriction would mean that many of the businesses would have to go out of business because they couldn’t let lorries through with the new height restriction.

The council had to refund up to one million pounds worth of travel tickets and remove the restrictions.

No one knew if it was a bid to get more money from traffic tickets or to relieve congestion in the city centre, but whatever it was, it failed hard.