It’s 8am on a Thursday morning in June, and commuters are gathering at the bus stop on Lower Richmond Road, checking their phones and watching the digital display. The 378 to Mortlake is due. According to the app, it should arrive in five minutes. Then four. Then three.
But something strange is happening. While time ticks forward on their phones, the bus’s expected arrival time has frozen. For six long minutes, the app shows the same thing: the 378 is stuck, its estimated arrival time no longer counting down like the other buses behind it on the same route.
What passengers don’t realise is that they’re witnessing the anatomy of a ghost bus—a phenomenon that’s become increasingly common across Putney as traffic worsens and bus operators game the system to avoid penalties.
The Vanishing Act
The 378 bus is caught in Putney’s notorious traffic, particularly the gridlock that regularly paralyses the High Street and Lower Richmond Road. As congestion builds, the bus falls further behind schedule, each passing minute pushing its operator closer to missing performance targets that determine bonuses and fines.
The bus app data tells the story in real-time. While subsequent buses on the route continue to show decreasing arrival times—indicating they’re moving through traffic—the lead bus remains static. It has stopped, likely at the traditional driver-change point next to Kenilworth Court, opposite the Star & Garter pub.
What happens next has become routine for Putney bus passengers, though few understand the system driving it.
The driver announces that everyone must get off—another bus will be along soon. The electronic destination sign switches to “Out of Service,” and the bus drives empty to the end of the line. From the operator’s perspective, this bus has ceased to exist in the performance statistics. It’s no longer running late because it’s no longer running at all.
Meanwhile, passengers who’ve already waited four minutes beyond the scheduled time must now wait an additional 12 minutes for the next 378 to arrive—a total delay of 16 minutes. But as far as Transport for London’s (TfL) monitoring system is concerned, everything ran perfectly on time.
The Numbers Game
This isn’t an isolated incident. The practice has become so widespread that locals have coined the term “ghost buses” for services that simply vanish from routes when traffic threatens to derail performance targets.
The 265 bus, which runs from Putney Bridge to Tolworth, was notorious for disappearing entirely during peak hours last year. Rather than run a full schedule and face fines for chronic delays, the operator simply stopped running buses at the times when most people needed them. When public pressure forced the service to resume, it recorded the worst performance score in Putney—2.1 minutes of Excess Waiting Time, more than double TfL’s target.
The system rewards this behaviour through a metric called Excess Waiting Time (EWT), which measures how long passengers wait beyond scheduled intervals. Bus operators face fines if EWT exceeds one minute, but earn bonuses if they keep it below that threshold. The catch? Buses that terminate early or disappear from service don’t count in the statistics at all.
This creates a perverse incentive: the worse the traffic, the more likely operators are to abandon passengers mid-journey to protect their performance scores.
The Perfect Cover
The 85 bus exemplifies this statistical sleight of hand. Despite being possibly the most complained-about service in Putney—regularly dumping passengers at Putney Heath and forcing them to walk the rest of the way—it scores as the best-performing route in TfL’s quarterly reliability data with an EWT of just 0.96 minutes.
The secret lies in TfL’s monitoring system, which only tracks performance at designated timing points along each route. If a bus never reaches those points because it terminates early, it doesn’t count against the data. The more curtailments occur, the easier it becomes to hit targets.
A First Bus representative explained the system at a recent council meeting: “Every single bus goes through designated timing points. And the buses must pass that point ten minutes apart. That gives you your data.” But if buses are pulled off the route before reaching congested areas like Putney High Street, they never reach those timing points—and never appear in the failure statistics.
The Traffic Trap
Putney has become the perfect laboratory for this practice. The High Street is regularly gridlocked, Lower Richmond Road experiences severe congestion, and the continued closure of Hammersmith Bridge to vehicles has funnelled more traffic through an already strained network.
Rather than address these underlying issues—by implementing bus priority measures, improving traffic flow, or updating timetables to reflect reality—the system has found a simpler solution: make the problem invisible in the data.
The evidence is mounting across multiple routes. The 265 is frequently seen turning around in Roehampton, halfway through its journey, leaving everyone waiting for the next bus. Regular “Out of Service” buses are spotted throughout Putney at strategic points where operators can dump passengers and race to the end of the line to reset their schedules.
The Accountability Gap
The practice has created a peculiar situation where everyone in the system benefits except the passengers. Bus operators avoid fines and secure bonuses by manipulating the numbers. TfL gets to report acceptable performance statistics despite knowing the reality on the ground. The council can point to official data suggesting services are adequate while privately acknowledging the complaints.
This accountability gap was starkly illustrated when TfL and Go Ahead, which runs Putney Bus Garage, refused to attend a public meeting organised by the Putney Society to discuss the ongoing problems. The meeting, scheduled for June 23rd, had to be cancelled due to their absence—prompting one resident to comment: “This is the contempt TfL treat us with… A disgrace.”
The Human Cost
For passengers, the impact is real and daily. Beyond the obvious inconvenience of longer journeys and uncertain arrivals, the ghost bus phenomenon has created a climate of mistrust. Passengers can no longer rely on app data, timetables, or even the buses they can see approaching.
The morning commuter waiting at Lower Richmond Road exemplifies this frustration. They’ve watched their bus disappear from the system, seen an empty “Out of Service” vehicle drive past their stop, and now face a choice: wait another 12 minutes for the next scheduled service, or start walking and hope to catch a bus along the way.
This is the anatomy of a ghost bus—a system designed to measure performance that has instead learned to hide failure. In Putney, where traffic makes reliable bus services increasingly difficult, operators have discovered it’s easier to make passengers disappear from the statistics than to solve the problems that cause delays in the first place.
The result is a transport network that looks functional on paper while failing the people it’s meant to serve. Until the incentive system changes, Putney’s passengers will continue to wait for buses that were never intended to arrive.
