Mystery driver fined £56k for taking cunning short cut

A mystery driver’s cunning short cut saw them clock up more than £50,000 in fines last year.

In the London borough of Newham, the driver of a Mercedes Benz managed to pick up 436 tickets in 2022, and has not paid any of them.

Each ticket has now been logged at £130, meaning the mystery driver faces a total bill of £56,680 for illegally driving down a shortcut.

The scheme, brought in to stop drivers using the route as a rat-run between two busy roads in East Ham, hits motorists with fines of around £1million a year.

The survey of local councils revealed scores of drivers have managed to rack up penalties of more than £15,000 in just 12 months.

Some are believed to be tradesmen who accept the fines as a work expense and bill it on to their clients.

Others have rogue number plates, making them difficult to track down.

Many of the fines are for parking, but increasingly councils have been slapping automatic penalties on motorists who stray into bus lanes or take rat-runs that have been closed off to non-local traffic.

In Kensington a Mercedes car with diplomatic plates picked up 104 fines last year for illegal parking.

Total fines were £13,370 before the council managed to seize the car.

But it released the vehicle when the owner claimed diplomatic immunity from fines.

Outside the capital a motorist in Hove, East Sussex, clocked up 382 £70 fines for illegally parking their Mercedes near the seafront. Officials say the owner had paid just one of the tickets, meaning they still had an outstanding balance of £26,670.

Cllr Darren Rodwell, transport spokesperson for the Local Govern-ment Association, said: “People who persistently park in an illegal manner and rack up large parking fines are behaving in a selfish manner and it is unfair to the millions of motorists who follow the rules.”