Gobbledygook from Ealing Council

“A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.” (Herman Melville)

At base level, this just comes down to holistic asset time-phases. You really can’t really fail when you facilitate third-generation paradigm shifts. But, you might want to consider transitioning relational collaborative infrastructures as well.

We all know that the Notices of Rejection are produced by stitching together stock paragraphs on a word processor. Since some of Ealing Council’s yellow box junctions have been ruled unenforceable at PATAS they have had to come up with some new esoteric wording to justify their continued highway robbery activities.

It’s all done by scaling standardized dynamic content in order to mesh extensible normalized resources, you understand.

Joking aside, this latest effort from Ealing Council is very telling. It demonstrates that the Parking Department is enforcing laws that are simply not understood by the people working there. Whoever approved this letter and let it out into the public domain is in need of some serious retraining.

Possible candidates are Philip Burns, Head of Parking or John Ioannou, Technical Services & CCTV Manager.

Let’s look at the best bits:

Your vehicle was observed entering and stopping in a yellow box junction.

So what? You can drive into the middle of a box junction and stay there all day so long as there are no other stationary vehicles around that prevent you from moving.

The regulations state that you must not enter a yellow box junction until your exit is clear.

No they don’t. This is the advice given in rule 174 of the Highway Code. This is not the same as the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions which says “no person shall cause a vehicle to enter the box junction so that the vehicle has to stop within the box junction due to the presence of stationary vehicles”. I can’t see the words “exit” and “clear” anywhere there.

Those road markings are in section 150 of the Highway Code and you must comply with them.

Please get up to date. It was rule 150 in the previous edition of the Highway Code. It was updated on 28^th September 2007; five months ago. The road markings are actually prescribed in Diagrams 1043 and 1044 of Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 2003.

Now comes the piece de resistance. The appellant had obviously said that the box junction needed to be authorised by the Department for Transport.

In response to your point in your correspondence, the authority given by the Secretary of Transport is given within the London Local Authority and Transport far London Act 2003.

The Secretary of Transport? Ruth Kelly won’t thank you for that. Perhaps that should be Secretary of State for Transport. And while we’re at it that should be Local Authorities, not Local Authority. If you are going to cite legislation then get it right.

The SoS for Transport does not confer any authority to use unlawful road signs in this Act. In fact, any authority given to legally extort money from the general population comes directly from Parliament.

In this Act it outlines that Traffic Management Orders are in place to allow Council Boroughs to enforce particular areas within their jurisdiction.

What are they talking about? A Traffic Management Order is not required for a box junction. Sure you can enforce loads of things as a result of this Act including “Failure to comply with notice requiring works to prevent soil or refuse escaping onto street or into sewer”. Wow!

Within this Act it states; “All road markings placed on a highway or road to which the public have access must be either prescribed by regulations or authorised by the Secretary of State for Transport…”

They just don’t geddit do they? What this says is that if your road markings do not comply they are unenforceable. A perfect own goal if ever I saw one.

This was obviously written by a Technical Enablement Leader who was trying to transition semantic standardized precision in order to obfuscate the reality of the incomprehension.

If you ever get one of these Notices of Rejection from Ealing you can be assured that it is a complete load of rubbish.

This article was written with the assistance of the Gobbledygook Generator on the Plain English Campaign website. It must be similar to the one used by members of the Ealing Council Parking Department.