Croydon Bus Lane Fines — PCNs & Income

Croydon issued 61,065 bus lane and bus gate penalties between 2021 and 2025 and collected £4,041,673 against them — an average of £66.19 per penalty, which sits almost exactly on the £65 discount rate that applied for nearly all of the period. That is a high return, and it means most drivers here pay early rather than contest. The story of the five years is one road: George Street. Enforcement began there on 2 January 2024 and it issued 8,765 penalties in its first year and 9,043 in its second, single-handedly turning 7,408 penalties in 2023 into 19,084 in 2024. Take George Street out and the borough's numbers are broadly flat. Addiscombe Road is the long-running site, with 27,175 penalties over the five years and no sign of easing. The council supplied its figures as raw penalty records rather than as totals, so the income here is cash actually received against penalties issued in each year, not money banked in that year — the two differ for penalties issued late in a year and paid in the next.

Which sites issue the most fines

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

Croydon gave us every penalty individually, so these are the locations its own records name. They are enforcement sites, not necessarily one camera each: Wellesley Road appears twice, once by George Street and once by the car park entrance, so it is shown here as one road with two sites. Two more sites came on stream after this period and issue no penalties in the figures above — Tamworth Road from 10 April 2026 and Park Lane from 15 April 2026. Between going live and 22 July 2026 they issued 766 and 89 penalties respectively, which is why neither appears in the table. Auckland Road in SE19 runs the other way: it went live on 10 January 2021, issued 2,174 penalties that year, and the council's own records mark it "scheme withdrawn". It has issued nothing since. The single penalty at Lower Addiscombe Road by Cherry Orchard Road is shown because it is in the council's data, but one penalty in five years is not a working enforcement site and it appears on no council start-date list.

Challenges & appeals — do they work?

Croydon would not tell us how many drivers challenged their penalties or how many won, so there is no way to say from this data whether an appeal here is worth making. It refused on cost grounds, saying it would have to open every case file by hand, and suggested asking again for a 30 to 90 day sample instead. What the figures do show is that penalties here are overwhelmingly paid rather than fought: the money collected works out at almost exactly the discounted rate per penalty issued. See our guide to appealing a bus lane PCN for the grounds that win.