There is a way to stop cyclists riding pavements and running red lights. Four bodies would have to agree to use it

Brad Sutherland was crossing Lower Richmond Road beside Putney Common. The green man was showing. A man on a bicycle came straight at him.

“I panicked and stopped walking trying to anticipate if he would swerve,” Sutherland told us. “Keep going,” the rider ordered. Sutherland got out of his way and said, “You’re running a red light.” The answer came back calmly: “Yes, I know.”

Sutherland rides a bike himself. “I have had many experiences like this,” he explained, outlining another when his son was small the two of them were nearly hit on a crossing on the Upper Richmond Road. A surprisingly number of other readers have also written to us since we ran a piece this week about the increase in dangerous cycling, and they describe the same two things: bikes going through red lights, and bikes on the pavement.

Four pedestrians have been hurt by bicycles on Lower Richmond Road since 2017, according to Transport for London’s official collision records.

Jonathan Lott is a cyclist as well. When he crosses Putney High Street on foot, he now looks round the line of parked cars before he steps past them, because that is where the bikes come from. He has seen, he wrote, “cyclists cycling at speed through pedestrians on crossings”, often when the light was green for the people walking. “I have often been driven at by cyclists on the pavement,” he told us.

Julia Bright wrote in about riders who “seldom give hand signals so you have to guess what they are likely to do or leave bags of room, no helmets, and an attitude that they are more entitled than anyone else!” She added: “I’m a cyclist but was taught to be aware of others on the road: hand signals are quite important.”

Five pedestrians have been hurt by bicycles on Putney High Street since 2017. Three of them were hurt in 2024.

Across the borough, from the start of 2017 to March this year, 108 pedestrians were hurt in collisions where a bicycle was the only vehicle involved. Forty of them were seriously injured and 68 slightly, accounting for 7.1% of all pedestrian injuries in Wandsworth. Across London the share is 5.3%, with Wandsworth ranking ninth of the 33 boroughs.

What’s important to note is that none of the incidents that readers felt compelled to write to us about will be included in the official figures. As another resident, Graham Morrow, put it at this week’s meeting with local police officers where the issue was discussed in depth, we are currently dealing with an epidemic of dangerous cycling.

It’s time to talk about dangerous cyclists

Not only Putney

We decided to look around and see if places other than Putney are reporting the same issue. It didn’t take long. We are not alone.

Camden has just made cycling offences a formal policing priority in two of its wards: Kentish Town North and Kentish Town South. As of 1 September, its local police force has been asked to focus on “cycling on pavements, failing to stop at red lights, and riding in a careless or antisocial manner.” The response, it has been agreed, will be “warnings, fixed penalty notices, or reporting offenders”. Camden came third in the London boroughs with the most pedestrians hurt by bicycles – 215 of them, 64 seriously, making up 12% of all pedestrian casualties.

Islington comes sixth in the list (116 hurt, 28 seriously, 9.7%). Its council leader put the hire-bike companies on a “last warning” in December, in an open letter setting out what the council expected them to fix. Riders running red lights was on the list.

On Wednesday night, the day after Camden’s priority was published, residents at the Thamesfield ward panel asked for cycling offences to be added to the ward’s policing priorities. The local sergeant argued that it could be added under an existing priority called “Theft – Pedal Cycle” – something that his officers have been investing heavily in and want to retain, for now, because of resource constraints. The current priority was kept.

Our research also turned up another interesting fact: when cycling last had a big boom in interest – over a hundred years ago in the 1880s – the same problem of a shift in behaviour where many more people started travelling on fast moving vehicles and its subsequent impact on pedestrian safety also become a big topic.

The “Safety Bicycle” which featured two wheels of an equal size, with a steerable front wheel and a rear chain-drive – effectively the same model we have today – was invented in 1885. Pneumatic tyres were invented in 1888 and made bicycles much more comfortable to ride – and as a result people rode faster. The law that bans riding on the pavement was written in 1835 and was extended to bicycles in 1888 in response to these technological developments that led to a societal shift in transport.

As such, it is not a coincidence that new, readily available e-bike technology that enables people to grab the nearest bicycle to them and go further faster with a battery has resulted in a jump in serious incidents and an increase of complaints about dangerous cycling. Cycling in London is up 43 per cent on 2019, by TfL’s count, at 1.5 million journeys a day.

Why the law is not enforced

While dangerous cycling may be a resurfaced issue, the risk to pedestrians from cars has long been something we have dealt with and have developed a whole arm of rules, regulations and infrastructure to limit that harm: cameras at junctions, a national register of who keeps every vehicle, penalty points on a licence, insurance that costs more once the points arrive, and the courts behind all of it. A driver who goes through a red light can expect to hear about it, usually by post. Nothing comparable has been built around the bicycle.

A car that goes through a red light on Putney High Street is photographed. Its plate is read. The DVLA says who keeps it. A letter arrives, points follow, the insurance premium goes up, and a court is there if it comes to that. Not one of those steps needs a police officer standing at the junction. A car without a plate is an offence in itself, and an officer can stop it for that alone. The whole system hangs from a seven-character string on the front and back of the vehicle: the licence plate.

A bicycle going through the same red light is seen by the same camera. But this time, the camera can do nothing with what it saw. There is no plate to read, no keeper to look up and no address to write to. The law has been broken in full view and there is nobody to send the letter to. Unless a person is physically standing at that junction, the only thing anyone can do with the offence is notice it. Mothers with pushchairs notice it. Older people on the pavement notice it. And when they are nearly hit, or have abuse hurled at them for challenging the behaviour, it sticks in their mind.

This week, one local police officer told residents he had stopped and ticketed a number of cyclists in recent months but senior officers were also clear that this is not the best use of limited resources. An officer could write tickets all day and change very little. The behaviour is everywhere and a ticket written by hand deals with one rider, at one junction, on one afternoon.

And then we have the jurisdictional issues. Transport for London (TfL) owns the cameras. This week, Putney.news asked what it could do with them. It got back: “TfL does not have powers to enforce cycling offences and would not issue penalties for offences such as cycling through red lights or cycling on the footway. Enforcement action in relation to these offences is undertaken by the Metropolitan Police Service and City of London Police, which may issue Traffic Offence Reports or take other action as appropriate.”

Wandsworth Council does not hold the criminal powers. The Traffic Management Act 2004 defines the owner of a vehicle as the person it is registered to. The same Act says civil enforcement officers may not be given the power to stop a vehicle. Between them, those two facts mean a council camera can only ever write to the person who has registered a vehicle, and bicycle are not registered, so it has no one to contact even if it wanted to.

TfL has the eyes without the authority. The council has the authority but not the data. And the police can’t be there all day. There is, simply put, no joined-up, institutional way to address bicycles riding on pavements or through red lights.

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Is the answer number plates?

If you thought the problem was limited to Wandsworth, Camden and Islington, you’d also be wrong. For five years, the problem of cycling offences has been periodically flagged in Parliament along with proposals for new restrictions.

In November 2021, the government was asked if it would consider number plates for bicycles. A transport minister gave an unequivocal answer in the Lords: there were no plans for registration; the costs would outweigh the benefits; it would put people, including children, off cycling; and a plate big enough for a camera to read would not generally fit on a bicycle.

But the issue has not gone away and has been raised repeatedly since then as more complaints about dangerous cycling have arrived. In June 2025, Lord Hendy, the transport minister, said “the Government have no plans to legislate for the registration or insurance of e-bikes or pedal bikes”, and that doing so “would be likely to put many people off cycling”.

The government’s position rests on a review the Department for Transport carried out in 2018 – before the current boom. But while bicycle licence plates may seem like the most logical answer – you can simply add them to the current system and infrastructure – that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good one.

Plates for private bicycles have been tried all over the world as – as far as we are aware, have never been successful. Toronto licensed bicycles from 1935 to 1957 and gave up. Switzerland ran a national scheme until 2012 and also gave up. Toronto’s own explanation, still on the city’s website, is that licensing “in and of itself does not change the behaviour of cyclists who are disobeying traffic laws”.

In a Lords debate in September 2024, Lord Austin of Dudley, a lifelong cyclist who chaired the all-party cycling group, make a key point about licence plates on bikes:

“The majority of cyclists who break the law are on electric hire bikes, which are already numbered and registered, so the people riding them could be arrested and prosecuted; but of course, the police do not enforce that.”

Later in the same debate Lord Shinkwin, who uses a wheelchair, described crossing a road the previous week as a cyclist came at him through a red light. “The light’s on red,” he shouted. “Yes, I know,” the rider said, and carried on. Shinkwin told him to stop, because it was illegal, and the rider sailed past. Brad Sutherland heard the same three words at the Lower Richmond Road crossing.

The ministerial answer from November 2021 – which was the first official sign that this was becoming a problem – has a second paragraph that may contain the solution instead. Having explained that plates could not be made to work on bicycles, the minister went on to say that trial e-scooters were required to carry a unique identifier “that will aid with enforcement”. The government said it could not be done and, in the next paragraph, confirmed that it was already being done.

Every one of Wandsworth’s hire bikes carries a number on its frame, reports its position by GPS and is rented through an account in someone’s name. The operators built all of that in a couple of years, because councils across London complained about bikes dumped on pavements.

In November 2022, Wandsworth had no agreement with Lime, and the council’s leader was threatening to have Lime bikes seized from its streets. In July 2025 the council signed a deal with Lime, Forest and Voi: 170 on-street parking bays, no-parking zones in the town centres, and half-price rides for residents on the council’s Access for All scheme. Zones where a hire bike slows itself down as it enters, and zones where the app will not let a ride end, were built to order once councils asked for them.

In the year to May 2025, hired e-bikes made 6.8 million trips in the borough, by the council’s count. That is close to 18,600 a day, somewhere in Wandsworth, right now. Of the eight borough agreements with operators that we have looked at, Islington’s is the only one that mentions how the bikes are ridden.

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Wandsworth has every tool it needs

Wandsworth Council already fines cyclists in its own parks. Under byelaws inherited from the Greater London Council, riding faster than twelve miles an hour in Wandsworth Park in Putney, in Battersea Park or on Tooting and Wandsworth Commons can bring a penalty, and the council used those byelaws on Tooting Bec Common last winter.

Wandsworth’s agreement with Lime, Forest and Voi is where that could be asked for. The Cabinet Member for Transport, Jenny Yates, said in July 2025 that e-bikes were “here to stay as a key part of Wandsworth’s transport network”. The agreement says nothing about how the bikes are ridden.

Last October, the council renewed a borough-wide Public Spaces Protection Order. A PSPO is the council’s own instrument: it names behaviours in a defined area and lets council officers, as well as the police, fine anyone caught doing them on the spot. The order covers drinking, drugs and dogs, but not cycling.

Some councils however have extended PSPO to include cycling offences. In Kensington and Chelsea, a PSPO bans cycling on the pavement and an enforcement officer can fine a rider for it there and then. So the council has the ability to empower itself to tackle one of the two key cycling offences.

The council could also put riding behaviour into the agreement it already holds with the operators. No law makes an operator tell a council or the police who was riding one of its bikes, and nobody can compel them to. The council can only ask, and the next renewal is the moment to ask. But the truth is that it doesn’t need to push at privacy laws if the e-bike operators can be persuaded to police the situation themselves.

A hire bike has everything a car has except the plate on the front, and the number on its frame does the plate’s job. A photograph taken of a cyclist riding on a pavement or through a red light – whether taken by a council camera, a TfL camera, or a pedestrian’s camera carries with it location and time. And the e-bike companies know exactly where all of their bikes are at any given time. They also know who is riding it, and they have their card details.

The laws – and fines – already exist

In 2023, across the whole of Great Britain, 44 people were prosecuted or convicted for careless cycling and five for dangerous cycling.

The laws and corresponding penalties already exist: a cyclist who goes through a red light can be given a £50 fixed penalty on the spot, or fined up to £1,000 in court. Riding on the pavement is a £50 fixed penalty, or up to £500 in court. Careless cycling carries a fine of up to £1,000 and dangerous cycling up to £2,500.

A driver caught by a camera at the same red light pays £100 and takes three points on a licence. Cyclists do not have licences but it is easy to see how an e-bike company could boot a persistent offender from its service.

Julia Raeburn, a daily cyclist from Southfields and Putney.news reader, also suggests a softer approach that could help reset cyclist behaviour: every six or eight rentals, the app should make the rider confirm the basic rules, stopping at a red light among them, ticking each one separately before the bike unlocks. She would also have the operators show riders what their own figures say about injuries.

It can’t just fall on the council though. As TfL noted, and the police has acknowledged, in London it is the Met that has the power to enforce the law when it comes to cycling offences. The whole idea behind residents setting local policing priorities is that residents often have a better idea of what is going on in their neighbourhood and if somebody is prepared to go to the trouble to attend a meeting and argue their case, it is usually a good sign that it is a real problem.

All of Putney’s seven wards hold a quarterly meeting where these priorities are set and with the Met increasingly focused on data and provable results, it is a good place to starting turning resident frustration into action.

Camden has already done so.

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The count nobody has

So what’s stopping the council, TfL and the Met was acting on this right now?

The simple answer is that nobody knows how bad it is. No one is measuring it. What we have instead are anecdotal records of near-misses, and records of the very worst cases. The 108 people hurt across the borough are the only count there is, and each of those records was made because someone was hurt badly enough to need one. Every red light run, every pavement ridden and every near miss that hurt nobody is in no dataset anywhere.

It is worth reflecting on how the problem that residents are reporting is seen when looked at dispassionately by the authorities through data. How many red-light offences do you think are reported every year in London alone? 1,000? 10,000? On average it is 62,400 a year or roughly 170 a day. And that comes from just 245 camera sites. So while the vast majority of us would never consider jumping a red light, it is something that requires constant enforcement which tells you something about human behaviour at scale.

Those figures are what the authorities check against when trying to decide whether something is an issue and where to focus resources. As things stand, without the buy-in of the authorities and without the structure to record cycling offences except for those that are dealt with by on-the-ground police officers, the cycling figures are less than a tenth of that: 11 cyclists a day. The number of cyclists fined for pavement riding? Annually, in London, under 200. The only serious dataset there is counts injuries, assigns no blame and cannot tell an e-bike from a pedal cycle. We are, in short, working blind.

The man who came at Brad Sutherland on Lower Richmond Road is not in any of the figures and it is safe to assume that was not the first time he went through a red light, and equally save to assume it is not the first time a pedestrian had to jump out of his way.

He went through a red light with the green man showing, told the person in front of him that he knew, and rode on. Nobody was hurt, and nothing was written down. No Freedom of Information request will find him.

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What you can do

The four bodies that would have to agree are the Met, Wandsworth Council, the hire operators and TfL. Each of them can be asked now.

The Met. Ward policing priorities are set by the residents who turn up to the ward panel. Camden’s new priority names “cycling on pavements, failing to stop at red lights, and riding in a careless or antisocial manner”; the same words can be asked for at any of these:

• East Putney: Thursday 17 September, 6pm to 7pm, Putney High School (Putney Hill entrance)
• West Putney: Tuesday 29 September, 6.30pm, Granard School
• West Hill: Tuesday 20 October, 6pm to 7pm, Southfields Library, 300 Wimbledon Park Road
• Wandsworth Town: Wednesday 21 October, 5.30pm to 6.30pm, Wandsworth Library
• Southfields: Saturday 24 October, 10.30am to 11.30am, St Barnabas Church, Lavenham Road
• Thamesfield: Tuesday 1 December, St Mary’s Church, Putney High Street
• Roehampton: no date advertised yet; the last panel was at the end of May

Wandsworth Council. Two questions for your councillors, ready to send below: will the council put riding conduct into its next agreement with Lime, Forest and Voi, and will it add pavement cycling to its Public Spaces Protection Order, as Kensington and Chelsea has done? If your councillor replies, forward it to postbox@putney.news.

The operators. If a hire bike is ridden at you through a red light or along a pavement, report it in the operator’s app with the number on the frame. That is the one record an operator has to act on. Lime says the number is there so it can identify the rider.

TfL. TfL has not said what its junction cameras can see or record. Your London Assembly member can ask it that at Mayor’s Question Time.

You. A photograph of a hire bike carries the time, the place and the frame number. Take it from the kerb, not the road, and send it to the operator. For a collision or a crime in progress call 999; the Met’s online reporting form takes video for anything else.

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