Driving in a UK town or city

Fewer than most people think. Clean air zones in England come in classes, and the class decides who pays. A class B zone charges buses, coaches, taxis, private hire vehicles and heavy goods vehicles. Class C adds vans and minibuses. Only class D reaches private cars, and only Birmingham and Bristol run one. London stacks two schemes of its own on top, the ULEZ and the Congestion Charge, and Oxford charges every petrol and diesel vehicle in nine central streets through its Zero Emission Zone.

That leaves Bath, Bradford, Portsmouth, Sheffield and the Tyneside zone shared by Newcastle and Gateshead as places where a car of any age drives in free, while the taxi that picks you up at the station may be paying. The table works each zone out for the same car, a 2012 diesel, using the rules held for that zone on this site. It is a calculation, not a figure the councils publish in this form, and your own car's answer comes from each zone's official vehicle checker.

Street parking and council car parks are enforced by the council itself, under what the law calls civil parking enforcement. The ticket is a penalty charge notice, or PCN, and the amount depends on how serious the contravention is. The 2022 charging guidelines for England outside London list the higher level ones: waiting on a yellow line, parking in a bay without the ticket or permit it needs, double parking, blocking a dropped footway, stopping on a bus stop marking. Everything else, overstaying the time you paid for being the usual one, is lower level.

The same guidelines give each council two bands to choose from. Band 1 is £60 and £40; band 2 is £70 and £50, and a council may use different bands in different parts of its area. The table lists what each city with a long page actually charges, read from that council's own pages, together with its camera bus lane charge and the body that hears appeals.

London sets its own levels rather than using the English bands. London Councils publishes two: band A, at £160 for a higher level contravention and £110 for a lower one, and band B, at £140 and £90. Band A covers twenty authorities outright, Westminster, Camden, Croydon and the City among them, plus the northern halves of Wandsworth, Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham, the west of Barking and Dagenham and several outer town centres. The rest of London is band B, and TfL enforces its own red routes. A camera PCN for a bus lane or a minor moving traffic contravention in London is £160, where a band 2 council elsewhere in England charges £70.

The prompt payment discount still halves the bill, so a band A higher level ticket paid inside 14 days costs £80. The trap is the charge certificate. Leave a London ticket unpaid past the Notice to Owner stage and the £160 becomes £240, a figure this site derives from the band and the 50 per cent surcharge.

The process in England outside London runs on fixed clocks, and each later letter starts a clock of its own. Missing one does not end the matter; it moves the ticket to a dearer stage and closes the cheaper routes behind you. These are the stages for a ticket left on the windscreen or handed to the driver.

Bus lanes have been camera enforced by councils for years, inside London and out. The newer change is moving traffic: yellow box junctions, banned turns, no entry signs and similar restrictions that only the police used to enforce outside London. Regulations in force since 31 May 2022 let the Department for Transport designate English councils to enforce them by camera, and only councils that already run parking enforcement can apply. Both bus lane and moving traffic contraventions are higher level in the charging guidelines, so they cost whatever the council charges for its higher level parking tickets: £60 in a band 1 area and £70 in band 2, halved for early payment.

Two parts of the statutory guidance protect drivers. For six months after enforcement starts at each camera, a first offence there should bring a warning notice rather than a PCN, and that applies again every time a new camera goes up. And a box junction offence can only happen because of what was in front of you when you entered it: if you were waiting to turn right and only oncoming traffic stopped you, the guidance reminds councils that you are exempt.

It looks similar and is a different animal. A supermarket, hospital or retail park operator issues a parking charge notice as a claim for breach of the terms on its signs. Operators in the British Parking Association or the International Parking Community follow the private parking single code, which caps the charge at £100, requires a discount of at least 40 per cent for payment within 14 days, and limits any debt recovery addition to £70.

You appeal to the operator first, within 28 days, and if that fails to POPLA for British Parking Association members or the Independent Appeals Service for International Parking Community members, again within 28 days. None of the council stages above, and neither tribunal, has anything to do with it.

Among the cities with long pages, park and ride means very different things. Some councils run dedicated bus sites on the edge of town; others lean on tram, Metro or Subway car parks run by the transport authority. The summaries below come from each council's or operator's own page, where the full timetable and current fare live.

Scotland uses the same idea of a council penalty charge, with its own figures. Across Scottish councils, mygov.scot gives 28 days to pay, a 50 per cent reduction for paying within 14 days, and usually a 50 per cent increase if a second reminder has to be sent. The low emission zones sit on top of that, with no daily fee and a penalty that doubles for repeat entries.

Wales has no clean air zone. Its two big differences are speed. The default limit on restricted roads, the lit residential streets that used to be 30mph, became 20mph across Wales in September 2023, with councils since told how to pick roads that can go back to 30mph. And five stretches of motorway and trunk road carry permanent 50mph limits to cut nitrogen dioxide, among them the M4 between junctions 25 and 26 at Newport and the A483 between junctions 5 and 6 at Wrexham, checked by average speed cameras. Welsh council PCNs go to the Traffic Penalty Tribunal, the same body that hears English appeals outside London.

In Northern Ireland parking is enforced by the Department for Infrastructure rather than the councils. A ticket there is £90, reduced by half to £45 if paid within 14 days, and a charge certificate raises it to £135. The two Northern Ireland pages on this site also explain why the vehicle test works differently, at Driver and Vehicle Agency centres.