Police spotting (junction watch)

It's really difficult to tell if car offences and cycle offences are being enforced evenly.

Anecdotally: on my commute there are two speed cameras and several red light cameras for cars. But I have never seen any plod stopping cyclists for RLJ in two years. I would say at least 30% of cyclists do this every day on this route.

My impression is that car offences are enforced more strictly, simply because it's easier. Cars have a license plate which allows easy identification by camera etc.

One issue with cars stopping in the ASL is that the driver may have a defence that it was not safe to stop at the first line - so to issue a ticket an officer would have to be sure that this defence is unavailable - ie (s)he would have to see the car drive into the box for no good reason.

Another issue is that there's no specific offence - the FPN would be for failing to obey a red light, which is three points and a fine. That seems very harsh to me - and probably to many plod. I think that there should be a specific FPN for this - then they would get issued more.

On a tangent - I think ASLs aren't a great idea anyway, as they can encourage cyclists to filter up to the front when that's unsafe. They are also very difficult to enforce for the reason above.

It's an interesting problem in a way- when there is no ASL cyclists and motorcyclists tend to filter to the front then stop in front of the stop line.

Would you make people wait in line if you enforced ASL's rigourously, and fined the cyclists that went over the line as if they had jumped the red?

And on the subject of ASL violations- surely the answer is to make them the same fixed penalty that cyclists get for jumping a red, £30 (or whatever it is) and no points.