Yellow box junctions are a form of legalised highway robbery

Everybody remembers their first car. Mine was a custard-coloured Nissan Micra. Sure, the engine sounded like a hairdryer, but back in the 1990s those four wheels symbolised a precious freedom. Fast forward three decades and the unremarkable silver estate parked outside my house presents not freedom but a defiant, possibly bloodyminded act of rebellion, a principled assertion that, despite the prevailing anti-car culture, I refuse to relinquish my liberty.

What am I driving? No, not a Nissan Qashqui, but a Skoda cash cow. Because every time I mirror, signal and manoeuvre past my front gate, I risk being slapped with an increasingly punitive penalty, fine or surcharge.

First came the £100 for dangerous speeding – I was doing all of 24 mph in a 20 mph zone. Then I discovered that parking in the neighbouring borough of Islington sees me pay the most expensive hourly rate in the country, at up to £12.50 an hour. On top of that, there’s an extra £7.05 hourly surcharge for diesel drivers who park on some roads – no point feeling smug though. There’s a petrol penalty too: £3.75 per hour. How is that even allowed? Not just allowed, but a nice little earner to boot; Islington also issues more parking tickets than any other council at more than 1,000 a day on average. Kerr-ching!

But now a whole new battleground has opened up in the war against motorists. Just as dozens of councils have applied for the right to fine motorists if they get caught in yellow boxes, an RAC investigation has revealed that of 100 yellow box junctions analysed in London and Cardiff, almost every one was far bigger than it needed to be – by as much as 50 per cent – leading to confusion, hesitation and “countless unnecessary fines” for bewildered drivers. Ostensibly these markings are laid down liberally in order to prevent traffic congestion; the fact they raise revenue at up to £160 a pop (reduced to a bighearted £80 if paid within a fortnight) is merely down to the law of unintended consequences. Or so we are meant to believe.

We’re not fooled. Neither is the RAC: “With more and more councils starting to enforce yellow box junctions, it is absolutely vital that they are designed first and foremost with aiding traffic flow and that they don’t exist simply to raise revenue from drivers.” Well said. They are a scourge on our roads.

Not even an electric vehicle will render you safe from the discriminatory, dishonest and mean-spirited box of doom. Such stealth taxes, such (no other words for it) sneakiness constitute highway robbery and are not just unfair but unbritish. The proliferation of impenetrable rules and regulations feels like a cat’s cradle, deliberately constructed to catch us out and trick us. I ostensibly live in a low-traffic neighbourhood, but that just means ridiculously long queues elsewhere, fumes spewing into the primary school playground at the top of the road, and, of course, school run fines accruing at every yellow jammed junction.

I now drive the car so rarely my husband has suggested we concede defeat and sell it for scrap. I tell him that were there better public transport connections I might consider it. But in truth my car is more than just a way of getting from A to B. It is a totem of my independence and I will not give it up without a fight.

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