If you’ve driven through Elm Road and Westbury Road in Kingston upon Thames, you might want to check your letterbox. Between January and August this year, the council issued an eye-popping 6,568 penalty charge notices (PCNs) for illegal stops at this notorious double-box junction. That’s £451,405 in fines or roughly £1,800 a day filling council coffers, all revealed by a Freedom of Information request.
The yellow boxes have been painted on since 2015, but penalties didn’t start landing on doormats until 2020 five years later. Since then, drivers have called the intersection a “trap,” with some caught out for just a split second by automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. In London, stopping illegally in a yellow box carries a tough penalty: £160, reduced to £80 if paid within 14 days.
It’s not the first time UK councils have faced criticism over yellow box cameras being used as “cash cows.” Even so, no other junction in Britain has raked in as much as Kingston’s double-box, which now holds the dubious honour as the country’s single most profitable road marking. And with movement in and out squeezing tighter every year, there’s little doubt the tally will keep ticking higher ... split-second or not.