The council’s fix for the Putney Bridge junction has been quietly removed. The temporary bus stop installed on Lower Richmond Road in November 2025 is gone, its signs taken down. Buses are back at their original position outside Kenilworth Court, opposite the left-turn approach to the bridge.
That reversal would be unremarkable if the junction were working. It is not. On Monday morning, the first full working week of the new Conservative administration, a resident emailed at 7:45am: “Utter chaos. The worst traffic in London!” The email was copied to Cllr Daniel Hamilton, who now holds the transport brief and has the power to change it.
The Putney Bridge junction redesign produced improvements according to the council – cycling is up and fewer pedestrians cross against the lights. For everyone else it has been an unmitigated disaster. In trying to deal with the enormous congestion the design has wrought, the council has focussed on protecting the Putney High Street corridor, which carries seven bus routes, and north-south traffic. On Lower Richmond Road and Putney Bridge Road, the routes that feed the bridge from the west and east, the story is different. Our recent piece documented the list of broken promises. This one documents what is physically in front of drivers right now.
What a bus driver sees every day
The core problem on Lower Richmond Road is the left turn onto Putney Bridge. The redesign took it from two lanes to one. The council’s position, repeated throughout 18 months of resident pressure, is that two lanes were never real capacity anyway. Its AECOM consultant calculated the old approach was “really equivalent to 1.2 lanes at best” because vehicles merged onto the single-lane bridge regardless.
A bus driver who works the junction daily has a precise objection to that calculation.
“Vehicles turning left from Lower Richmond Road into Putney High Street seem to think that the left-hand lane is a bus lane,” wrote Andy in a comment on this site on Sunday, “and immediately try to merge with the traffic in the right-hand lane. In doing so, they block the left-hand lane, preventing vehicles coming from Putney Hill from clearing the box junction. As a bus driver I often have to wait for multiple light changes in order to cross the box junction. Often there are 4 bus lengths of empty tarmac in the left-hand lane.”
The 1.2 figure assumed drivers would use the lane they were given. Andy says they don’t. Our own analysis in November noted the AECOM report did not explain why the new single-lane design, which feeds the same single-lane bridge, produced such severe queuing. The bus driver’s observation adds the practical answer: drivers treat the left lane as a bus lane and merge early, leaving four bus lengths of empty road while the queue backs up behind them.
The council has heard versions of this argument for 18 months. Its position has not moved. Transport officer Henry Cheung set it out in an April email: “Removing the traffic island on LRR is something we have investigated with our consultant and TfL, but this did not yield any merits to pursue as Putney Bridge remains as a single general traffic lane.”
The junction design is, in the council’s view, settled. Everyone else disagrees.
A new cabinet member on day one
Cllr Hamilton received his first junction complaint on his first working day.
“How could you possibly think that it was a good idea to restrict the traffic flow on Wandsworth Bridge with Albert Bridge closed and Putney already beyond collapse?” the resident email to the man responsible for sorting out the junction, Henry Cheung, read.
Hamilton is not new to this. At the February Transport Committee meeting, his last before the election, he moved formally that the junction remain on future agendas. “I think it is one that residents want to see real action on,” he said.
What acting on it requires is also on record. Cheung has made it clear why he doesn’t feel anything on the junction itself can be touched – because the redesign plan “was unanimously supported by the Transport Committee back in September 2023 in Paper 23-304, therefore it will need to follow a very similar committee process, and it will be at the direction of the Cabinet Member for Transport.”
A Cabinet Member direction. A new committee process. The next Transport Committee will be in September.
The 18-month scorecard
The redesign improved things on the routes the council was protecting. Signal timing changes and a road widening at the TK Maxx end of the High Street, completed in February, produced some improvement for north-south traffic.
Other fixes have still not happened nearly a year later. A bus stop inset opposite TK Maxx, which requires moving BT infrastructure and signal equipment, still has no completion date. A lane change outside Putney Station, promised for February and relisted as “due May 2026,” has had no update since April.
On the east-west corridor, the picture is different. A Felsham Road through-traffic consultation committed for “May or June 2026” has not appeared on Citizenspace, as of 9 June.
Bus stop Q, used as a driver changeover point and positioned directly in the left-turn queue, was described in January by Cheung himself as “an ongoing battle.” Discussions with bus operators about driver changeover locations have been “really difficult.” Nothing has changed. And according to the most recent exchanges, the council has simply given up.
The bus stop P relocation was the one physical intervention on the Lower Richmond Road approach. It is now gone. Before it went it was being routinely ignored by drivers anyway. The redesign itself has not been touched. And as for Putney Bridge Road, with its excessively long bus lane that buses can’t get into because, ironically, the bus lane is too long and so the daily traffic backs up so far they can’t get into it; whose entry into Putney Bridge Junction is given the least green time: nothing has changed.
Eighteen months of fixes improved things modestly on the route the council was already protecting. On the routes it sacrificed, the one physical intervention has been quietly abandoned and the buses are back where they started. The junction design, the cause of all of it, remains unchanged. Hamilton has the power to change that.
Cllr Hamilton can be contacted at cllr.d.hamilton@wandsworth.gov.uk.
