Cardiff Bus Lane Fines — PCNs, Income & Appeals

Cardiff issued 270,156 bus lane penalties in the five years to March 2026 and took £9,043,736.83 for them. The annual figure more than doubled over that period, from 33,512 to 74,568, and almost all of the rise comes from cameras that did not exist for most of it: Kingsway switched on in April 2023, then North Road and Harbour Drive Bridge in April 2024 and Westgate Street that June. Those four sites have issued 108,794 penalties between them — 40 per cent of the five-year total — and Westgate Street alone issued 17,873 in its first year, more than any other site in any year. The older cameras are going the other way. Caerphilly Road fell from 2,033 a year to 611, Cathedral Road from 958 to 177, Crwys Road from 573 to 129 and Malvern Drive from 6,037 to 3,409, while Newport Road peaked at 13,244 in 2023/24 and then more than halved to 6,078. Over the whole period the busiest single site is Custom House Street on 49,859. Drivers pay early and they pay often. Around three-quarters of every penalty issued is settled at the £35 discounted rate — 74 per cent in 2025/26 — and counting only the drivers who pay at all, the discounted share rises to between 84 and 89 per cent. Between 83 and 87 per cent of penalties issued are paid in the end.

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.

The council named 16 camera sites. Seven of them line up one-to-one with a lane page here and carry their penalty counts; the rest need explaining. Three rows each cover more than one physical bus lane and are reported as a single combined figure — Caerphilly Road, which has three separate lanes, Custom House Street, which has two, and Newport Road, which has six. Splitting those totals between the individual lanes would mean guessing, so they are not attributed to any one page. A further six sites have no page here at all: Cathedral Road, Cowbridge Road East, Southern Way (Slip Road), Malvern Drive, Westgate Street and Harbour Drive Bridge. Three of those are among the busiest cameras in the city, and their absence reflects what Cardiff publishes rather than what it enforces — the council's public bus lane page does not list them, so their hours and permitted vehicles are not on record. Two smaller oddities are worth knowing. Churchill Way issued 621 penalties in the first three years and then nothing at all in 2024/25 or 2025/26, which the council did not comment on. And Duke Street, which does have a page here, appears nowhere in the enforcement list, so either it has no camera or it has issued no penalties in five years.

Challenges & appeals — do they work?

Formal representations to the council. Drivers made 33,409 formal challenges over 5 years.

The council's own figures show the share of challenges upheld went from 72% in 2021/22 to 72% in 2025/26 — so a well-grounded challenge is worth making. Drivers made 33,409 formal challenges over the five years and Cardiff upheld 23,252 of them — just under seven in ten. That is a strikingly high cancellation rate; most authorities that publish this figure uphold between a quarter and a half. Only 6,084 challenges were rejected outright. The three numbers do not add up in any year: 4,073 challenges, 12 per cent of the total, are neither upheld nor rejected in the council's table and it did not explain what happened to them. Appeals to the independent Traffic Penalty Tribunal are counted by calendar year rather than financial year, so they cannot be shown in the table above. There were 645 of them between 2021 and 2026, against 33,409 challenges made to the council. The tribunal upheld 74 and rejected 327; the remaining 244 are unaccounted for in the same way, and the 2026 figure covers a part year. See our guide to appealing a bus lane PCN for the grounds that win.