What this site is
BusLaneCheck is an independent reference for UK bus lanes and bus gates. It currently covers 1,906 camera-enforced locations across 175 areas and 124 enforcing authorities, and for each one it gives the operating hours, the vehicles allowed through, the penalty for driving in it, and a link to the council page the details were taken from.
Councils do publish this information. They publish it in traffic regulation orders, in PDF appendices to committee papers, in map layers and in press releases — rarely on one page, and almost never on the page a driver lands on after searching a road name. The site exists to collapse that search into one lookup.
Who runs it
BusLaneCheck is compiled and maintained by Luke Segal. It is an independent project and not a council service: it is not affiliated with, funded by or endorsed by any local authority, Transport for London, or any enforcement contractor. No council pays for placement here, and neither does any company selling PCN appeals.
Freedom of Information requests are sent in the same name, so where an authority publishes its disclosure log, the request behind a figure on this site can be traced back to it in the council's own records.
Where the data comes from
Every entry carries the URL of the source it was taken from, and that source is always the enforcing authority or the statutory record — never another aggregator, and never an estimate. In order of preference:
- The council's own bus lane page or camera list, where one exists.
- The traffic regulation order that created the restriction, where the council publishes no summary. Hours transcribed from a TRO are labelled as such on the page so you can see the wording they came from.
- Transport for London's published bus lane dataset for London locations, alongside the relevant borough's own material.
- The authority's response to a Freedom of Information or Environmental Information Regulations request, for the penalty figures in the fines section.
In England a council may only issue bus lane penalty charges if it is named in the current schedule of the Bus Lane Contraventions (Approved Local Authorities) (England) Order 2005. That schedule is checked before an authority is added, so the site does not describe a lane as camera-enforced by a council with no power to enforce it.
How an entry is verified
Two things are recorded on every lane, and both are printed on its page:
- Verified. 1,805 of the 1,906 entries have had their hours and permitted vehicles confirmed against the council source. The rest carry a visible warning that says so. An unverified entry is never presented as settled fact.
- Last checked. A month-precision date showing when the entry was last read against its source. It is a freshness claim, so the build refuses to let entries drift: anything more than 18 months behind the newest date in the file is flagged for re-verification.
What “camera enforced” means here
This is the field most likely to be misread, so it has four states rather than two:
- Camera enforced (1,513 lanes) — the council's published camera list names this location.
- Mobile enforcement (61) — no fixed camera, but the authority patrols the location with mobile CCTV.
- Not on the council's camera list (301) — the council publishes a list of its cameras and this lane is not on it. That is positive evidence of absence, from the enforcing body itself.
- Unknown (31) — the council publishes no camera list at all, so nothing can be said either way.
The distinction between the last two is the whole point of the field. “We could not find out” is never recorded as “there is no camera”, because on the page that reads as permission to drive in.
The fines data and how it is obtained
The figures in the bus lane fines section are not published by councils voluntarily. Each one comes from that authority's response to a Freedom of Information or Environmental Information Regulations request, which councils have 20 working days to answer.
What the council sent is what gets published: the original response documents are linked on each authority's page, totals are never estimated, and a gap in a council's disclosure is shown as a gap rather than filled in. Where an authority has answered on penalty numbers but not yet on the money, the page waits rather than going out half-built. The underlying figures are the councils' own and are released under the Open Government Licence.
Reusing this data
Two different bodies of data sit on this site, and they do not carry the same terms.
The fines figures are the councils' own numbers, disclosed under FOI and released under the Open Government Licence v3. Reuse them on those terms, and link back to the authority page you took them from so your readers can reach the original response.
The bus lane and bus gate records are a different thing. The underlying facts — a road's operating hours, which vehicles are exempt, which cameras a council runs — belong to the enforcing authorities and to Transport for London, each publishing under its own terms, and nothing here changes those. What this site owns is the compilation: 1,906 records pulled out of scattered council pages, PDFs and traffic orders across 175 authority areas, normalised into one structure, checked against source and dated.
Quote it, cite it and link to it freely — in an article, a forum answer, a piece of research or an AI assistant's reply — with a link back to the page the detail came from. What is not permitted is bulk copying: scraping or reproducing the database, or a substantial part of it, to republish elsewhere. For anything this does not cover, email contact@buslanecheck.co.uk and ask; the answer is usually yes.
Whatever you reuse, the roadside sign is still the legal authority, and a record here can go out of date between checks.
What this site does not do
- It is not legal advice. The guides explain how the penalty and appeal system works; they cannot tell you whether your own PCN is valid.
- It does not estimate. If a council has not published a lane's hours, the page says the hours are not published — it does not infer them from a nearby lane.
- It does not overrule the sign. Restrictions change, and a council's own page can be out of date. The roadside signage is the legal authority in every case, and if it disagrees with this site, the sign is right and we want to hear about it.
Corrections
Corrections are genuinely welcome, and reports from drivers and from councils are a large part of how entries get re-checked. If something here is wrong, email contact@buslanecheck.co.uk — the road name and the town are enough to find the entry, and a link or a photograph of the sign makes it much faster to fix.
Every report is checked back against the council source rather than taken at face value, and an entry that changes gets a new “last checked” date so you can see it moved. The same address reaches us for press enquiries and questions about reusing the FOI data.