hi all,
While I agree with most of what has been written, and yes I think the tendancy is for some restrictions to be abused leading the authorities to be more over zelous than they perhaps aught to be the over riding factor must be the courts, in the form of a test case or cases. yes there is a certain ammout of hassle and time involved but in the end it is the only way to resolve the issue.
personnally I would see them in hell before I paid a fixed penalty and would choose to go to court everytime,
the one and only time this happen to me was a case in point, I was flashed by a traffic light camera for stopping on a box juntion and issued with a fixed penalty notice when it came I chose to go to court,
meanwhile I wrote to the athourity to get hold of the relevent photos, it clearly showed a ambulance in front of me exiting the junction where the exit was too narrow for it to pass me, in court I produced to photos and explained that I had stopped to allow the ambulance to pass with it blues a twos blaring as carrying on would have blocked it's exit the lights were on green when I entered the junction and my exit was clear, untill the ambulance came passed, I argued that in fact it was the ambulance that triggered the camera and not me but only showed my car stood on the box junction, I also argued that while it was techically an offence to stop on a box junction a bigger offence would have been to carry on and block the emergency services progress while attending an emergecy, the magistrate agreed and the case was dismissed, if I had been a a pushover and paid up it would have cost me £60 and points.
while all the facts are not known from watching a single video clip I am sure there would be no case to answer if it went to court, there are circumstances were it is not allowed to stop on yellow lines even to drop off a passenger, but a residential street is not one of them.
there are double yellows on the village main street where I live but no policeman or warden would issue a ticket while a resident stopped outside their house to unload shopping or open the driveway gates, and in fact a couple of the houses have a disabled box painted in the middle of the lines outside their house, hows that for inconsistancy.