Manchester Fining Hellhole.

[Minnierose11]

We recently visited Manchester from Devon for a birthday break, never been before and wanted to sample the city's shopping and eateries.

I'll never visit again - the whole place feels like a scamming hellhole.
One morning walking to our car (parked in a car park) at £21.95 for 8 hours and over when a EHO stopped us and tried to fine us £200 on the spot for supposedly spotting us drop fag butts on the floor ... WE DONT EVEN SMOKE!!
My husband refused to give our details and we walked off to which he claimed to call the police and followed us all the way back to our hotel where we sat in our room for 40 minutes feeling rather panicked!!

Now back at home, we've just received a fine for driving through a 'bus gate', of which being from Devon never even knew was a thing!! I know of bus lanes, clearly marked on the road but a bus gate??
No vehicle access between the hours of 6am and 9pm... and a sign which supposedly indicates that which I've never seen before in my life. Not even in the Highway Code..
and I know fear we may have another one or two on the way, because we were none the wiser! Just blindly following the sat nav around a city we'd never visited before.

Never again!

Nobody has called it that since the 90's 🙄
You need to update your references 😂

The "flying motorcycle" sign is definitely used in Devon. Look, here's one!

@Battytwatty I disagree with them too- I'm not the worlds biggest fan of Manchester but I think the food scene is the best bit of it!! Still licking my lips at the American breakfast I had in an American themed place near Piccadilly station

All of the signs that I’ve seen that don’t allow cars or motorcycles etc have a red line through them, not just around them.

I would say the same as this poster. So I went to look at the HW code and realised there actually aren't any with a line though it. I think people (myself included) are seeing no smoking, no alcohol and no crossing signs etc with the line though and automatically think all NO signs have it. It's the way our subconscious brains work.

https://www.shutterstock.com/search/no-pedestrian-sign

So what? Are you trying to make a virtue out of ignorance?
I have been driving longer than that and first came across one over 10 years ago in Swindon, even though I live in the semi-rural East Midlands of England.
Since then I have seen loads.

Honest to god this site! I think you should shuffle off to Reddit or Kiwi Farms and find your people.

Everywhere in this country is turning into a scamming hellhole.

Just got back from portugal - you pay (not much like £20) to have a scanner thing put in your car and it pays all the tolls for you (linked to a card). No penalty. Automated and quick.

Not here, here they hope you don't pay so they can charge an extortionate penalty.

A penalty charge for driving through a no motor vehicles restriction isn't really similar to a routine road toll though, is it? Plus, I'm pretty sure the OP was complaining about the charge in principle, not objecting that the options for paying the charge weren't convenient enough!

To those saying they haven't heard of "bus gates", I'm not sure that really matters. A bus gate is just a short stretch of road where most motor vehicles aren't allowed. The signs will be the usual ones for no vehicles (or no motor vehicles) except for buses, or possibly no entry except for buses (if other vehicles are allowed to pass in one direction only). These are standard signs which have been in use for a long time, having first been proposed in 1963.

@needtofatoff I think a big part of this is lack of money at local level- so they are going for an 'easy hit' it's the same with parking fines for the most minor stuff- 4 minutes over etc

As a Londoner, I agree. The best way to have a good time in Manchester is to go to Piccadilly Station and buy a ticket to Liverpool Lime Street.

Manchester is the greatest city on earth (or at least in England) and driving round there is a piece of piss. YABU.

Bus gates are in London too! Two on my way to my old workplace and I didn’t work centrally. Says in big letters about contravening the Highway Code as well if you drive through them.

I remember that sign from my cycling proficiency theory test in 1986. I didn't know it was a rare sign restricted to Manchester.

People who don’t understand road signs shouldn’t be driving.

Scamchester is a pretty awful place to visit by car.

I think that is the idea though. Tax the hell out of unwary visitors in order to pay for the services.

As long as you travel with TfW then strikes aren't a concern, it's only the non-devolved operators with poor industrial relations, the various devolved governments are more pragmatic.

To be fair I wouldn't have known that they were called "bus gates" if I hadn't seen the thread about Oxford earlier this year. I don't think that the name is very clear.

I still know that sign means "no motor vehicles" though.

There's a bus gate in the village I live in. 2000 people live here.

And I'm very surprised that you haven't seen that sign before - it came up in my Highway Code questions when I sat my driving test nearly 30 years ago!

The cigarette butts though, and getting followed - that's not ok. Not at all.

Sole purpose of bus gates is to collect revenue from those who haven't seen them before.

They're not in the highway code, were introduced with no public information strategy and are created by a simple traffic order. If it said 'bus lane' instead of gate then no-one would be confused and very few people caught. However then they would have to paint lines on the road. The subtlety is that the 'gate' designates the whole road as bus/taxi only.

Wherever they have been introduced in the UK they have caught huge nos of motorists and raised thousands.

https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2021-08-09/bristol-bus-gate-fines-quashed-over-poor-warning-signs

Lol it’s not hard to drive around Manchester if you pay attention

Trouble is when you are following the satnav and it says go left you probably have about 3 lefts to chose from within viewing distance. It could be hard to work out which was is forbidden from the sign the Op showed us. Especially if you see a bus headed off down one.
The sign someone posted in Devon had the road sign plus extra info.

Is that Transport for Wales?

Because that’s not much fucking use if I’m not going to Wales.

We've moved on from the mid 90s. Manchester is one of the fastest developing cities in the UK for a reason with massive investment. Anyone with a brain knows driving through city centres isn't advisable. Get the metro link in, one of the best light railway systems in the world apparently. There are loads of amazing parts of Manchester, it's just easier to slag it off when you come from an insular rural backwater. I go to Devon regularly to visit a friend and am always glad to get out, insular, xenophobic, closed minded, very few facilities and crappy public transport. Pretty countryside but MCR is half an hour from the peak District which smashes Devon out of the park.

As someone who moved to Manchester for uni 20+ years ago and has never looked back I'm beginning to see why people in Devon and Cornwall complain about tourists tbh...

Except the picture of the road the OP showed us clearly has the bus gates marked as the end of the road with distances and, as far as you can see in the picture, there is only one road on the left that is directly after the sign and appears to be a one way street into the road the OP is on so it is clearly not the road being indicated ... if you can't figure out how far 100yds is then you shouldn't be driving.

Not to mention the fact that you really should not just be blindly following the satnav, you should be taking in the signs and obeying them over the satnav and the signs are clear enough.