A Putney florist has been fined by Transport for London (TfL) for using the loading bay outside his own shop while he was preparing flowers for a wedding.
TfL has issued Marios Zikas with a £160 fine because, it says, it saw no activity in the loading bay for 10 minutes. Zikas appealed explaining that time must have been spent preparing fragile bouquets for transport.
But TfL has refused to back down, leading to an increasingly unusual set of exchanges in which TfL officials have asked him to prove he was loading his car and even disputed how his business works in an effort to order to uphold the fine.
The dispute comes as TfL has also removed one of the few parking spaces available to Mr Zikas’ customers on the busy stretch of Upper Richmond Road in order to make way for e-scooter parking. Its actions have started to threaten his business, Mr Zikas told Putney.news.
In response to TfL’s request that he prove to them he was loading flowers for a wedding, he sent the wedding invoice indicating the time and day of delivery. TfL refused to look at it, however, because the invoice was due on 20 August, two weeks before the wedding.
“Please note that the invoice you provided has a due date of 20/08/2026. The date of contravention is 03/09/2026. Therefore, we cannot consider your evidence,” TfL wrote.
“Who gets paid the same day as the wedding?” he asked Putney.news, who runs F for Flower at 150 Upper Richmond Road. “If I don’t get paid at least two weeks before the wedding, I don’t do the wedding,” he said. “I have to order the flowers.”
TfL’s case is that its camera watched his car in the bay from 1.42pm to 1.52pm on 3 September and saw “no activity that could be construed as loading”.
The rule on this stretch is no stopping from 7am to 7pm, Monday to Saturday, except to load for up to 20 minutes between 10am and 4pm. The burden is on the driver: in TfL’s words, “the onus is upon the registered keeper” to prove loading.
That day, he told TfL, he was loading flowers for a wedding in Chelsea. He has no van, so wedding flowers travel in his car, in buckets, and loading means trips back and forth into the shop. “I don’t just stop for one bouquet,” he said. “Who does that?”
TfL asked him for proof on 28 September, 25 days after the ticket. His shop camera, he says, keeps about a week, so by then his own footage of the day had gone.
He asked TfL for its footage instead. On 27 October TfL wrote that “a copy of the CCTV footage as requested, will be sent to you under a separate coverage letter”. More than two weeks later, it has yet to arrive.
He has appealed to London Tribunals, the independent adjudicator for London’s parking and traffic tickets, and has been given a hearing date. “If needed I will go to court for that ticket,” he said. “All they want is to get the money.”
The same stretch of road
Gaby, at a car rental business next door, says customers there are regularly ticketed: for stopping before 10am or after 4pm, when no stopping is allowed, or for pulling into its driveway with half a metre of car left over the pavement, by the same camera that is fining Mr Zikas and his customers.
Mr Zikas says he warns any driver he sees pulling up outside, customer or not, that it can cost them £80. Some customers, he says, give up on finding somewhere to stop and do not come back.
This is the stretch of Upper Richmond Road where TfL painted over parking spaces near a GP surgery for hire bikes this month, then refused to give them back. Drivers had other places nearby, TfL said, “including disabled parking and loading”.
A red-route ticket costs £160, halved to £80 if paid within 14 days.
Red-route fines brought TfL £89.3m in 2023/24, up from £56.8m five years earlier, according to its draft annual report as reported by the PA news agency.
TfL ended last year with a surplus of £6m. Its own year-end report says its other income came in £184m above budget, mainly from higher road and tunnel enforcement.
TfL says its penalties are an “important deterrent to drivers”, not a way to raise money.
Mr Zikas is still waiting for TfL’s video, and now for his day before the adjudicator. The invoice, due two weeks before the big day, remains the one piece of evidence TfL says it cannot consider.
Got a red-route ticket?
- Challenge it with TfL first, and send everything you have: receipts, delivery notes, photos.
- If TfL rejects your challenge, you can appeal to London Tribunals, an independent adjudicator, within 28 days of the rejection letter, as Mr Zikas has. It costs nothing to appeal.
- London Tribunals’ own guidance lists a delivery note as evidence for a loading claim.
- Across London, drivers won 48.9% of the appeals an adjudicator heard last year, counting tickets from councils and TfL alike.
- You can ask TfL for its camera footage of your car, as Mr Zikas did.
Run a shop on a red route? Tell us how you load at postbox@putney.news.
I think we know who has most influence over TFL, ‘my lord’.
This is terrible. We need to support local shopkeepers. How can we press awful TfL to drop the case?