Tube strike turned Putney into a Monday traffic nightmare, with gridlock reaching record levels and one desperate driver literally taking to the Thames Path. Lower Richmond Road backed up to Barnes, tiny side streets jammed, and buses too packed to board.
Day one of London’s week-long Tube strikes turned Putney into an automotive hellscape so bewildering some were left wondering if we’ve slipped into some alternate version of reality.
The carnage began early as commuters abandoned their usual District Line routes from Putney Bridge, East Putney and Southfields stations. By morning rush hour, the scale of the meltdown became clear.
Lower Richmond Road set a new record with tailbacks stretching past Putney Common all the way to Barnes station. That’s over a mile of solid, unmoving metal.
Even the normally passable residential streets in West Putney joined the traffic jam party, with cars backed up all the way to St Simon’s Church. Werter Road and Oxford Road, already infamous for their ability to trap drivers in automotive purgatory, somehow managed to outdo themselves serving as mere halfway points of congestion. Felsham Road went from rat run to rat crawl.
Sometimes it felt like the only way out of Putney was the train. Buses were overcrowded at 7.30am, leaving stranded passengers at bus stops at 8am. Picture sardine tins, but with more frustrated commuters and less dignity.
When desperation meets traffic laws
As frustration mounted to levels that would make a Buddhist monk boil, some drivers abandoned road rules entirely. Oxford Road saw motorists cut down and across opposite lanes to escape the gridlock. And one motorcyclist shocked residents by going the wrong way down a one-way street off Putney High Street.
But the day’s most gloriously unhinged moment came when a pedestrian walking along the Thames Path near the former Harrods repository found their route blocked not by the usual threesome of owner, dog and bicycle but by a car, squeezing its way toward Barnes along the gravel footpath.
The walker, presumably too stunned to do anything else, stopped to photograph this monument to human desperation – a vehicle so utterly defeated by Putney’s traffic that they’d taken to a pedestrian path beside the Thames like some deranged off-road adventurer. Imagine what happened when the driver found out Hammersmith Bridge is still closed.
Perfect storm
It was perhaps not surprising for an area already suffering from three of London’s five worst bus routes (14, 265, 93), ongoing roadworks that seem to exist purely to test human patience, and the perpetual gridlock at Putney High Street junction that defies all attempts at rational explanation.
With four more days of strikes ahead and additional bus strikes planned for next weekend, residents face what local businesses are calling their worst transport week in years. Oh, and a new sign also went up this weekend warning motorists about planned roadworks on – you guessed it – Upper Richmond Road between 12-14 September and 19-21 September. You couldn’t make it up.
The question isn’t whether tomorrow will be better – it’s whether we’ll wake up to find someone has stuck an outboard motor on the back of their Mini and tried to sail it down the Thames, because honestly, nothing would surprise us at the moment.
He wasn’t a desperate driver. He was an arrogant driver.