Some city councils are more than happy to let you ride your motorbikes in their bus lanes, but others aren?t.

Most of the fantastic cities in the United Kingdom of Great Britain have dedicated traffic lanes for buses. It?s a great way to help them (the buses) avoid rush-hour gridlock and get to their stops in a timely manner. That, in turn, incentivises the townspeople to use public transport, rather than clogging up the roads with their cars. And the good news for us motorcyclists is that a great many of these towns allow bikes and motorbikes to travel in their bus lanes too. This makes perfect sense, since we motorcyclists have a negligible impact on congestion, and we?re few enough in our numbers not to cause an embuggerance to the buses in their bus lanes.
But there?s a problem. Because there are still a good handful of cities in the UK that refuse to get onboard. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol and parts of London are all still lumping motorbikes in with the rest of the traffic and banishing us from the bus lanes.

Caught out

On a recent ride in Bristol, the three of us here at 44T all got pinged, one after the other, in the same bus lane, and were issued a £60 fine. The video from that fateful day is just underneath this paragraph. I?m not going to start making excuses for us; we should have took more notice of the signage. But a £60 fine does seem a little outrageous for something that would be absolutely fine in...