Nottinghamshire Bus Lane Fines — Carlton, Hucknall & Mansfield

Nottinghamshire issued 69,860 bus lane penalties over the five years to March 2026 and took £2,393,774 for them. The county's enforcement is dominated by one name: Nottingham Road, counting Nuthall and Mansfield together, accounts for 39,525 penalties — 57% of every bus lane ticket the county issued. Nothing else comes close, with Stoke Lane in Carlton second on 8,542. Four new cameras switched on in November 2023 at Bridge Street, West Gate, Mansfield Road and Bridgford Road, and between them they have issued 6,639 penalties since. The annual total fell for three years running to 12,747 in 2024/25, then rose again to 14,958 in 2025/26, the highest of the five years. One figure is missing from the table above: the council reported that 1,522 penalties were paid at the £35 discounted rate in 2022/23, against roughly 10,000 to 11,000 in each of the other four years, and in a year whose income was the second highest of the five. That number cannot be right alongside the rest of the council's own data — 1,522 discounted payments would leave £434,000 of the year's income to come from full-rate payments, implying a pattern nothing like any other year — and it is also the exact figure the council reports for March 2023/24 in its monthly table, which suggests a copied cell. It has been left out here rather than reproduced as fact. In the four years that do reconcile, the share of drivers paying early is remarkably steady at 76% to 78%.

Which locations issue the most fines

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

Two things in this table do not line up with the council's own list of where its cameras are, and both are worth knowing before reading the figures. First, Leeming Lane South in Mansfield Woodhouse has issued penalties in each of the last three years — 238 in total, and 71 of them in 2025/26 — but it does not appear at all in the current camera list the council supplied in the same response. Either the list is incomplete or the site has been decommissioned since, and the council did not say which; there is no page for it here because nothing has been published about its hours or permitted vehicles. Second, the single "Nottingham Road" row covers two different roads in two different towns — the peak-hours bus lane at Nuthall and the 24-hour one at Mansfield — which the council reports together and did not split. That row is therefore not linked to either lane page, because attributing all 39,525 of those penalties to one of the two roads would misstate both. The Beeston site is a tram gate, not a bus lane: the council's own list gives its permitted vehicles as trams, so it has no lane page either, but its penalties are counted here because the council counts them as bus lane penalties.

Challenges & appeals — do they work?

Formal representations to the council, and appeals to the independent Traffic Penalty Tribunal. Drivers made 6,966 formal challenges over 5 years.

The council's own figures show the share of challenges upheld went from 21% in 2021/22 to 26% in 2025/26 — so a well-grounded challenge is worth making. Formal challenges run at a flat 1,357 to 1,439 a year regardless of how many penalties are issued. The council upholds roughly a quarter of them — 375 of 1,438 in 2025/26 — and rejects roughly the same number again; it did not explain what happens to the remainder, which is roughly half of every year's challenges. It also marked each of its "accepted" figures with an asterisk and gave no key for it, so what that qualifies is unknown. Very few drivers go on to the independent Traffic Penalty Tribunal: 103 across five years, against 6,966 challenges made to the council. Of those 103, the tribunal dismissed 54. The remaining 49 are counted here as allowed, which combines the 15 the tribunal formally allowed with the 34 the council chose not to contest — the driver does not pay in either case, but the two are different things and the council reported them separately. The year-to-year numbers are small enough that one case moves the percentage a long way: 2023/24 saw just two appeals, both dismissed. See our guide to appealing a bus lane PCN for the grounds that win.