There was a moment at Saturday’s meeting when you could see the frustration crystallise. Council Leader Simon Hogg had just finished explaining – again – why the Putney Bridge junction couldn’t simply be reverted to its previous layout. The groans were audible. Someone shouted: “Just tell us why not!”
After 10 months of worsening traffic, if everyone agrees the junction isn’t working, why can’t someone just fix it?
The answer reveals something more troubling than incompetence. It exposes a system so fragmented that even when everyone wants change, nobody can deliver it alone. Putney isn’t just gridlocked on its roads. It’s gridlocked in bureaucracy.
The three-headed beast
When a woman died at a pedestrian crossing in East Putney in May, residents had been warning about the danger for years. Everyone agreed the lights needed changing. Under pressure, Transport for London committed to act.
The new lights – literally just some traffic lights with a button and a countdown timer – will be installed at some point before March 2026. Almost a year after her death.
This is the pace Putney is dealing with, and it stems from a fundamental problem: power is split between multiple bodies, none of which can act without the others.
Wandsworth Council controls the road layout, pavement widths, parking restrictions. They own the physical space and can redesign it – but only with permission. Transport for London controls the traffic lights, bus routes, strategic transport decisions. They can change timings – but only if the road layout supports it. National government controls funding for anything major.
It’s like renovating a house where one person owns the walls, another owns the roof, and a third controls the budget. Everyone has a veto. Nobody can move alone.
“National government, TfL, you Fleur and you Simon are all Labour,” Sue from Montolieu Gardens pointed out, “and you’re saying you can’t get through to TfL. What is going on?”
Shared political party doesn’t mean shared power. TfL operates with its own priorities, its own timescales, its own assessment of what matters most across London. Putney’s crisis is one item on a very long list.
The sunk cost trap
When residents ask why the junction can’t be changed back, some of Hogg’s explanations are legitimate. Modern road design must meet current safety standards, and the previous layout may not qualify. Going backwards would still require proving it meets today’s regulations.
But then comes the unconvincing argument: “We’ve spent the money doing it.”
This is the sunk cost fallacy. The money is already gone. If the current layout doesn’t work, that expenditure is already wasted. The relevant question isn’t what’s been spent – it’s what will work going forward.
And here’s what makes this argument particularly hollow: Wandsworth has the money. The council just approved a capital programme that includes £10 million this year alone for roads and pavements. A complete redesign of Putney Bridge junction is estimated at £500,000 – 5% of this year’s roads budget.
The council is also spending £14.3 million on Battersea Park Station improvements, £13.1 million on Nine Elms Park, £4.9 million on Falcon Road Underpass, and £2.9 million on the Queenstown Road corridor. These are all substantial projects, and notably, most are in areas represented by Labour councillors.
Money isn’t the constraint. Priority is.
Hogg also suggests reverting would “take several years to get consensus around a new design.” But councils have powers to implement experimental traffic schemes that can be modified based on results. Emergency measures can be deployed when there’s genuine crisis. The “several years” timeline assumes business as usual – hardly appropriate when residents describe their lives as “intolerable.”
What actually moves (and what doesn’t)
Since the summer, TfL has added five seconds to the green light time for turning left from Lower Richmond Road onto Putney Bridge, two seconds for turning right. Hogg admits this is “not nearly enough,” but it proves traffic lights can be adjusted quickly when TfL decides to act.
After Anderson’s bus task force meetings, the Green Man bus stop reopened. Bus timetables were adjusted not to solve delays, but to make services more predictable within the gridlock.
These are the victories after months of meetings. Not solutions. Accommodations to failure.
More changes are promised by the end of October: traffic light adjustments, relocated bus driver changeovers, technical changes allowing buses to pull in more effectively. The council has prepared plans and submitted them to TfL. Now they wait.
“The council have done all of their part,” Anderson explained. “It’s Transport for London that need to get on and do that.”
This was the refrain throughout Saturday. The council has acted. TfL must respond. In that gap, Putney suffers.
The bridge nobody can fix
If you want to understand how thoroughly the system is broken, look at Hammersmith Bridge.
Closed since 2019 – over six years – the bridge is directly responsible for much of Putney’s traffic nightmare. Everyone agrees it needs fixing.
Hammersmith & Fulham Council owns it. TfL must approve any solution. Heritage England has authority because it’s listed. National government must provide £240 million. The Department for Transport must approve the funding application.
Foster & Partners have designed a restoration plan. It’s too expensive. The plan is being reworked. An infrastructure fund exists that “can be applied to” – the Secretary of State confirmed this last month.
The holdup? TfL and the council must submit a joint funding application. They haven’t done it yet.
Anderson assured Saturday’s meeting: “I raise it wherever and whenever I can” and “I am doing absolutely all I can.” She keeps a picture of Hammersmith Bridge on her door so passing MPs see it.
But six years of effort with no concrete progress raises uncomfortable questions. Parliament offers powerful tools – urgent questions, adjournment debates, cross-party campaigns, ministerial meetings. How frequently and effectively have these been deployed? Saying you’re working hard isn’t the same as getting it done.
Councillor John Locker articulated what residents need: “A timetable for when this will get fixed. That is what we need because then we can plan everything else around that.”
After six years, Putney still doesn’t have one.
Where the levers are
Understanding this fragmented system determines where residents should direct their pressure.
TfL is crucial for immediate changes – traffic lights and bus routes could improve in weeks or months. But TfL operates across the entire capital. Making them prioritise Putney requires sustained pressure: residents emailing directly, the MP using parliamentary channels, the council pushing through formal meetings, and making it a public political issue TfL can’t ignore.
The council has more power than Hogg suggests. They could declare a traffic emergency. They could implement experimental schemes. They could establish the Task & Finish Group this publication has proposed for over a month – a mechanism the council has used before. The question is whether they want to take those risks.
Anderson’s role is to be the connector and escalator – using parliamentary tools to force ministerial attention, making issues too costly to ignore. Six years on Hammersmith Bridge suggests this hasn’t worked, raising questions about whether the tools are inadequate or haven’t been used with sufficient force.
What changed on Saturday
The meeting didn’t resolve anything. Promises were vague, timelines uncertain, responsibility diffused. Hogg apologised but offered no bold new approach. Anderson detailed advocacy but couldn’t point to concrete results.
What changed was the political calculation. Gail Renard, head of the Erpingham Road neighbourhood watch, put it bluntly: “There is an election in May, and we will use our votes if this is not rectified soon.”
Local elections are seven months away. That’s the timeline that might actually matter – not the promised letter next week, not the October traffic changes, not the November committee review. The May ballot box is non-negotiable. It’s the deadline that can’t be extended or explained away.
Sean Pooley made the comparison explicit: “I work in the world of commerce. If someone had a critical problem in my business and it was ten months later and you’re still listening to the problem, I would have been fired by now.”
In commerce, there would be accountability. In local government, consequences arrive once every four years. Putney residents are making clear they remember.
The uncomfortable truth
Saturday’s meeting revealed what officials didn’t want to admit: they don’t have good answers because the system doesn’t produce them.
The governance structure makes rapid action nearly impossible. Everyone can point to someone else: the council blames TfL, TfL points to London-wide responsibilities, Anderson highlights governmental constraints, national government says it’s local.
Nobody owns the whole problem. When nobody owns it, nobody fixes it.
But that’s a choice. TfL could prioritise Putney higher. The council could be bolder – and they have the funds, with £10 million allocated to roads this year and a junction redesign costing an estimated £500,000. Anderson could use parliamentary tools more forcefully. The Mayor could direct resources. Government could fast-track Hammersmith Bridge funding.
They choose to move at a pace that treats Putney’s traffic as an administrative inconvenience rather than a daily crisis.
Harry from Erpingham Road tried to make the stakes clear: “Every morning frustrated drivers are racing up that road as fast as they can. That’s a school road. At some point somebody is going to be killed.”
This isn’t about bureaucratic efficiency. It’s about safety, quality of life, and whether the systems that govern us can respond to crisis with appropriate urgency.
The residents who packed St Margaret’s Church gave up their Saturday to be heard. They were civil, informed, and clear about what they needed.
They left energised – not because they were reassured, but because they realised that within this fragmented system, there are only two effective solutions: public protest and the ballot box.
I think we all agreed action is needed on LRR, but what is that ‘action’? The underlying issue is a mismatch between the supply and demand for roadspace and solutions must addess this. Road widening schemes? Adding a pedestion bridge aside the road bridge? Make the bridge a toll bridge to discourane those car commuters from Surrey? Demolish Hammersmith Bridge and rebuild with anything quick and easy? Remove cycle lanes? Maybe there was accord on the last two of these. But it is not all Simon’s problem.
The cost of a new bridge could be funded today by making HB a toll bridge and securitise future revenue through an ivestment bank.
The hope was that the council would have listened to all the pleas, and the survey results, and the videos and the private meetings and come to the meeting and offer a realistic and professional path forward to resolve these clear problems in coordination with the community. It’s fair to say that did not happen. The big question now is: what does Putney do? Do we develop a pressure campaign? Do we use our collective skills to do the policy work ourselves and so speed up the process? Or do we just live with this unpleasant reality while the council makes piecemeal changes and hope for the best? — What are your thoughts?
You say that “[Hammersmith] bridge is directly responsible for much of Putney’s traffic nightmare,” but that us simply not true. It makes a small contribution in that, after its closure to motor there was a small increase in traffic on LRR, but the real
serious problems began only when the Putney Bridge junction reorganisation took place. And you also say that ” Everyone agrees that it needs fixing,” but that’s not true either. Don’t be fooled into thinking that only those with biggest mouths are the only ones commenting: many people like me prefer it as it is now – which, by the way, means that Hammersmith Bridge is NOT closed, but is fully open to pedestrians, cyclists, scooters riders etc. I wish more would recognise this,instead the loudmouth want to spaff £250 million at least on this chimera. And who believes that, in the UK at present, the £259 in figure will be the final one?
Thanks for your comment. You’re right that the Putney Bridge junction changes made things worse but that’s a separate problem in itself. But the closure of Hammersmith Bridge to traffic has also had a huge knock-on effect across Putney and Barnes, and that’s been clear from both transport data and what people experience day to day.
The pedestrian and cycle access is great and most people value that, but it doesn’t solve the wider issue. Rather than arguing over which restriction causes which jam, maybe it’s time to think bigger. London deserves better connections for everyone – drivers, cyclists and pedestrians alike – not a permanent bottleneck that divides communities.