The Bristol Evening Post’s headline story this morning points a finger at TV presenter Noel Edmonds for driving an unlicensed cab in the city’s bus lanes. Now I personally don’t advocate what Mr Edmonds is doing, but with an estimated fortune of more than £70m and many successful business ventures, it seems clear to me that he is just exercising a fundamental entrepreneurial tactic. There are lots of things in business where you have to weigh up the cost of doing something against the benefit that activity will bring. In most cases, if the benefit is greater than the cost, then you will probably do it. And in Mr Edmonds case, he clearly benefits more from sailing past the choking traffic and arriving stress free at his job, than the fine he will receive if he is caught.
The newspapers’ story focuses on ‘a scathing attack’ on Mr Edmonds from the councillor in charge of transport in Bristol, Mr Gary Hopkins. Mr Hopkins official statement outlines that ‘Mr Edmonds is only a teatime game show host. That certainly does not give him the right to help himself to the city’s bus lanes and cheat his way past law-abiding drivers. It seems that in his attempt to impersonate a law-abiding taxi driver Mr Edmonds has even resorted to carrying a stuffed dummy in the back seat.’
I was bemused that Mr Hopkins doesn’t mention what will happen to Mr Edmonds if he is caught. So I rang him this morning to ask him the question directly. Mr Hopkins advised me that ‘if Mr Edmonds is caught he will be fined £30 like everyone else who is caught driving in the bus lane. The council is aware of his number plate and we’re on the lookout so he’d better watch out. He hasn’t bought immunity’.
So that’s that then. However, I doubt you’ll see Noel Edmonds using the bus tomorrow…
By Steve West
Marketing & Business Development Manager
Bristol City Council don’t use dedicated bus lane monitoring systems – they’re just repurposed traffic-counting cameras. Some BCC bossnik decided that he wanted to spin a little cash from them.
Because those cameras run on interlaced footage, they can be viewed at high resolution in real time, but trying to extract a still image causes a blurry mess – which obscures the number plate.
The image can be re-formatted but doing so renders it legally useless as it has been ‘tampered with’.
And they can’t send the original footage because the filesize is huge.
So to escape his £30 levy, all Noel needs to do is ask them politely to prove it.
This is hilarious! I thought Noel Edmunds couldn’t stoop much lower after hosting Noel’s House Party… evidently, I was wrong!