Bristol Bus Lane Fines — PCNs & Income

Bristol raises more from bus lane enforcement than any other authority in this dataset — £20,809,846 over five years, from 700,630 penalties. That is £29.70 a penalty against a charge of £70 reduced to £35 for prompt payment, and it is earned by a high payment rate: 411,797 of the 700,630, nearly three in five, were paid at the discounted rate. Enforcement peaked in 2021/22 at 187,468 penalties and has fallen to 129,734, with income following it down from £4.87m to £3.44m. The fall is not uniform. The long-standing city-centre gates on High Street, Baldwin Street and Victoria Street are all well down on where they started, though High Street turned back up in 2025/26. Against that, the Cumberland Road gate has issued 90,884 penalties since it began in 2023/24, and the three East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood gates — Avonvale Road, Marsh Lane and Pile Marsh — went live in 2025 and issued 32,701 between them in their first full year. Bristol is not enforcing less; it is enforcing in different places.

Which cameras issue the most fines

Camera-enforced bus lane locations ranked by PCNs issued in 2025/26. The last column is the 5-year total.

Seventy-eight cameras. Bristol reports its figures camera by camera, and where several cameras sit on one road they are added together here so each row matches one bus lane or bus gate page — Baldwin Street has four, Fishponds Road twelve, and Union Street and Broadmead four between them. The busiest single camera in the city is the one on High Street, which issued 122,569 penalties over the five years — ahead of Cumberland Road on 90,884, and well ahead of any one of the Baldwin Street cameras, though Baldwin Street's four together come to more. Matching it to a page took some work, because the council names that one gate three different ways: "High Street and Bristol Bridge" on its published bus gates page, "High Street Junction Baldwin Street" in the bus lane list it released under request 77300054, and "High Street (Junction Baldwin Street)(Bus Lane 4)" in this penalty data. All three describe the same south-eastbound gate running from the Baldwin Street junction down to Bristol Bridge, and all three agree on its hours and exemptions, so the row links to that page. The bus lane numbers are no help as identifiers — two different cameras here are labelled Bus Lane 5 and two more Bus Lane 3. A Bath Road camera the council labels only "Bus Lane 1", with 26,249 penalties, is matched by elimination rather than by name: the council's own lane list holds exactly four Bath Road sections and this data holds exactly four Bath Road cameras, three of which it names outright, which leaves Bus Lane 1 as the Park & Ride junction. One row is left unattached on purpose. The council records a camera as simply "Romney Avenue" with no direction, and it appears only in 2025/26, the same year the separate inbound and outbound cameras fell to 1 and 9 penalties between them — so it looks like the two were merged into one record, but the response does not say so, and the site holds a page for each direction. Many of the smallest rows are cameras that recorded only a handful of bus lane contraventions in five years, several a single penalty. They are listed rather than dropped so the figures add up to the council's own totals, which they do exactly.