I would suggest to RW that charges for stopping in a box junction are not just ‘a way to extort yet more money from the motorist’ but actually a national scandal in the making that will eventually lead to personal injury. For example, Brent Council in north-west London seems to have gone box junction crazy recently. At one in particular (East Lane junction with Llanover Road) I know of four motorists, including my wife and myself, who incurred £130 fines for stopping there. No doubt hundreds more have also incurred fines here.

As RW said the problem is that it really is not always easy to see far enough ahead to know if the traffic will flow over it properly. Presumably councils like Brent know this and realise what an easy way it is to make money. As more and more motorists get clobbered with disproportionately excessive fines at these box junctions then I believe they will start taking drastic, possibly dangerous action to avoid being caught: emergency stops before driving over them, sudden short bursts of acceleration to get through them and even driving into opposite lanes to circumvent them. This can surely only lead to more accidents, injuries and insurance claims. Nobody stops on these junctions deliberately but the punishment far outweighs the ‘crime.

Surely there needs to be a more considered approach to this kind of offence: perhaps an initial warning, then a first fine of just £10 doubling for each further offence committed over say, a three year period, after which they are struck from the record and you start again. A more lenient approach like this might make people think the approach is fair and genuinely aimed at improving road safety, rather than just raising revenue (apparently Brent has a huge pension deficit).