Meet the man who has been fined 15 times in three weeks for transgressing road restrictions in Bradford city centre.

Richard Garthwaite was “stunned” to discover that he now faces a total bill of £900 in penalty charges – three-quarters of his monthly wage.

The 33-year-old has racked up the fines since Bradford Council switched on new CCTV cameras to catch private vehicles illegally entering sections of Bridge Street and Market Street, where only buses, Hackney carriages and bicycles are allowed.

Mr Garthwaite, who drives his delivery van to shops in the city centre to pick up fresh produce for the deli he runs near Centenary Square, said: “I think people have been over-penalised.

“The new road restrictions are really confusing. I’ve been driving the same route for four or five years, but I have been done 15 times in the last three weeks on a 100-yard stretch of Bridge Street.

“If you got a £30 ticket through the post, you would realise what you’d done wrong and think ‘I won’t go down there again’.

“But what they seem to be doing is totting it up at their leisure, then saying ‘right that’s been a month, let’s deal out all the tickets.’ “They could say ‘yes you have been through it six times, but let’s fine you once so you understand what you’ve done wrong’.

“Instead of that, they are milking it for all it’s worth.”

If Mr Garthwaite had paid up quickly enough to benefit from the early-payment discount, he would have paid £450 for his 15 offences at a cost of £30 each.

But the fines doubled to £60 each – £900 overall – because his payment was delayed after the fines were sent to his old address in Wyke rather than his new home in Halifax – something he admitted was his own fault for not updating his details with the DVLA.

John Blackburn, Bradford Council’s assistant director for highways, said: “We treat everyone equally and enforce the law and we cannot let people off just because they have several fines.

“Anyone with multiple fines should contact us to make arrangements to pay.”

As the Telegraph & Argus reported this week, the Council has dished out more than 16,400 tickets since the cameras went live on September 20, totalling fines of nearly £500,000.

Mr Garthwaite said: “I like to use suppliers in the city centre because it’s better quality and cheaper, but the accessibility is making it more difficult. A journey that used to take 30 seconds between Bank Street and Aldermanbury now takes 12 minutes.”