Everyone’s junction but nobody’s fault: Putney Bridge crossing move approved

Pedestrians looking to cross Putney Bridge will soon have to do so in three stages rather than two, following a decision last night by the council’s transport committee.

The decision passed despite Labour opposition councillors objecting, citing safety concerns, and without a single resident speaking, except for the cabinet member for transport who lives minutes from the road junction and provided a personal reflection on the decision. Cabinet decides on 12 October.

The move, costed at £450,000, sends people crossing the bridge to two traffic islands rather than one in order to provide more green time for cars on Lower Richmond Road turning left onto the bridge: 42 seconds of green every cycle rather than 25.

Currently, whenever someone presses the button to cross, it takes that time from Lower Richmond Road’s entry onto the bridge – one reason why traffic backs up for almost a mile from the junction to Putney Lower Common in the morning. The hope is that, combined with two other recent measures – the removal of bicycle wands from Putney Bridge Road on the other side of the junction, and the insetting of a bus stop on Putney High Street at the third entry point to the junction – that traffic will be brought down to tolerable levels after two years of gridlock following a botched junction redesign.

Officers told the committee the change would not compromise safety, while also noting that pedestrians “may choose to ignore and not follow the prescribed route” – council speak for ‘run across the road rather than wait’. Cllr Jenny Yates, who ran transport until May, focused on the fact that people may want to cross through the traffic where the lights used to be and objected to the change as a result.

Cllr Nick Austin, the Cabinet Member for Transport, made the case for the change in personal terms. “My friend Hillary was hit by a lorry on Lower Richmond Road four weeks ago,” he said. A client had been hit on Farlow Road by a driver trying to escape the queue. He had watched videos of children outside three primary schools “having to endure horrendous rat running down Felsham Road”.

The reality, Cllr Austin noted, was that pedestrian safety at the junction had simply been “displaced into the Lower Richmond Road”. On the crossing itself: “I’m told by the officers that it is not going to have an adverse impact on pedestrian safety.”

Time will tell if the change impact pedestrian safety but within Wandsworth Town Hall more time was spent rewriting history than properly addressing the issue.

What she started

Cllr Yates, now the opposition’s transport speaker, welcomed the Cabinet Member “continuing with measures that we had started but were still in progress”, seeming to claim credit for movement on an issue that dominated the recent local election in this part of Putney and which Yates herself had noted in a private letter to TfL had caused “an unmanageable amount of public pressure and anger”.

That pressure led the previous administration to announce a series of changes including a bus lane suspension outside the Odeon cinema, double yellow lines, new lanes outside the station and road widening outside TK Maxx. But these measures had limited impact while Cllr Yates and former leader of the council Cllr Hogg repeatedly refused to make any changes to the junction itself.

Not one true word: Cllr Jenny Yates’s traffic claims, fact-checked

Since taking power, the new Conservative administration has taken many of the steps that residents have been demanding. Cycle wands on Putney Bridge Road came out in July and two traffic lanes go back in October.

Yates’ paper of November last year dismissed that precise change, noting that the second lane was worth “potentially an extra six vehicles” and that any benefit would be lost when a lorry stopped at the line; changes to approach lanes would be “of limited significance”.

In reality, residents have already seen a marked improvement in traffic levels now the changes have been made – a fact that Cllr Yates indirectly acknowledged last night by placing the blame on council officers: “You always assured me that the impact on the traffic flow would be negligible” she told the transport committee.

The island outside Snappy Snaps went in August, removing an obstacle that limited the number of cars that enter the junction from Putney Bridge Road. Back in February, her committee recorded “an aspiration that the island would be removed in the Summer 2026, the fallback being during October half term”. By contrast, rather than setting a seven-month delay in taking action, the new cabinet member for transport removed the island within weeks of taking up his position.

Under Cllr Yates, in April 2025, the council extended bus lane hours so cars were not able to enter the long bus lane that was approved with the junction redesign and which has also contributed to excessive traffic on Putney Bridge Road leading up to the junction. The new administration has scrapped that extension.

And the pedestrian crossing which will now be removed following last night’s meeting was, in Cllr Yates’ November paper, “a highly valued feature for pedestrians”, with the old three-stage arrangement listed among the reasons why the junction layout itself could not be changed.

Cllr Yates was right about one thing: the new paper contains no road safety section. The former administration repeatedly argued that the junction could not be changed because the new design improved pedestrian safety. But dig into the figures and the claims are based on single-digit injuries at the junction. A single person knocked down next week would flip the entire argument.

Consult the residents

Cllr Yates also criticised the current administration’s plans by repeatedly asking whether residents would be consulted before the crossing moved.

However her own administration was repeatedly and publicly castigated for failing to do exactly that. Before the junction was built in 2024 there was no public consultation. Resident anger with traffic levels rose to the point that a new community group – the Putney Action Group – was formed and ran its own survey with 1,373 responses.

Putney.news also ran a poll that drew 1,000 responses in which eight out of ten readers singled out the lack of consultation from the council as unacceptable.

In addition, a year of Freedom of Information requests found that despite Cllr Yates claiming she was working on the issue, no minutes, reports or briefings from the meetings her administration said it was holding actually existed. A consultation on side-road rat-running she promised residents never happened.

The only consultation that the council under Yates did carry out was run over two days in October 2025 and specifically targeted cyclists and pedestrians, much to the irritation of local residents, in a transparent attempt to produce statistics that supported the council’s position on the junction and its refusal to make changes to the layout.

When it comes to community consultation, the leader of the council at the time told residents at a public meeting why it wasn’t going to consult them. “That would take several years to get consensus around a new design,” Simon Hogg told a packed St Margaret’s Church in October 2025.

In an attempt to further distance herself from her own actions, Cllr Yates also told the committee last night that it was not her scheme. It was, she said, “the previous Conservative ward councillors [who had] pushed very hard for it”. She even claimed “other Putney stakeholders such as the Putney Society” were in favour.

The junction design was approved in September 2023 under her administration while she was the responsible cabinet member and with her in the room.

What the officers remembered

Henry Cheung, the officer who has been responsible for changes to junction for two years, told the meeting why the cycle wands on Putney Bridge Road could go when previously he said they couldn’t.

The new administration had suspended the bus lane trial and widened the High Street, Cheung noted, “which means essentially there’s now scope for Putney Bridge Road to have the same amount of green time but have more stacking space”. More than 1,100 vehicles now cross that stop line in each peak, he said.

Ten months ago, Cheung wrote in a paper sponsored by the previous administration and Cllr Yates that the lane change was “considered negligible”, and, in an email in April, that removing the island “did not yield any merits to pursue”.

Council pushes Putney traffic crisis into 2027

Not all the changes made by the new administration are going smoothly: Weiss Road has been turned in a one-way road on a temporary order without a consultation, and Cllr Austin admitted forgetting his own restriction on its first day.

The results of the traffic counts now on the ground will go to residents after the bridge crossing works, the meeting heard. Cllr Austin told the committee “nothing is off the table, nothing has been decided, and nothing is permanent”, while also supporting a paper that asks Cabinet to make the trials permanent.

Another issue is that no metrics have been agreed to or decided to provide evidence of success or otherwise: no queue length, journey time or bus figure has been set by which anyone will know whether then changes – and the agreed £450,000 in new works – have actually worked.

One thing has not changed. TfL has told the council that Lower Richmond Road cannot get its second lane back, because the islands built in 2024 are already at their minimum size. It is worth noting that another previous council paper claimed there was no real benefit from running two left-turn lanes from Lower Richmond Road onto the bridge anyway; an echo of the paper that argued there was no benefit from removing the cycling wands on Putney Bridge Road only for reality to prove it wrong.

In what sounded briefly like a promising development, Cllr Austin said the council had looked at reopening the tunnel under the bridge for pedestrians – something we pointed out would have enormous benefits for Putney, and not just for the junction. The response: “Just not cost viable”, according to council officers.

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Cllr Austin opened the evening by thanking Cllr Yates for three years of hard work for residents. She thanked him for carrying on her measures. Between them sits a junction one group designed, the other installed, and now the first is taking apart.

Also decided last night

Four other papers went through the committee on the same nod, all bound for Cabinet on 12 October.

Transport cuts. A paper on the council’s spending review arrived after the agenda was published and was taken last, at 9.25pm. The version on the council’s website runs to three pages of prose and contains no figures. The version councillors had in front of them contained a table, and the argument was about the table. Cllr Yates asked why the forecast capital spend for 2027/28 had risen to £63.1m when the programme agreed in February was £46.4m: “Are you inflating spending forecast figures to justify cuts?” The finance officer said he did not have the answer to what made up the figure. The chair, Cllr Noel Dube, told her: “I think you have the papers which some of us don’t.” Cllr Toby Hopkins counted twelve walking, cycling and public realm schemes cancelled or scaled back, including the bike hangar programme, halved this year and cut entirely next; Cllr Austin did not dispute the count. What the committee was told: a £5m cut to the base budget, needing £7.7m of savings across two directorates, parking and permit charges rising from March 2027 by amounts not yet decided, thirteen new camera enforcement sites the highways director could not confirm, and “delivering our services with fewer staff frankly”. One line in the published appendix says the council will review TfL’s plans for East Putney station and Upper Richmond Road “to ensure any Council contribution delivers value for money”. Nobody raised it. Cllr Yates called it “the most important paper in front of the committee” and was told she had “indulged” herself. Labour’s objection was minuted.

Hire e-bikes. A Fair Use Charter for Lime and Forest, and a new council enforcement team of two vans and four staff, paid for from what the operators pay the council. Lime may run up to 2,850 bikes in the borough and Forest 1,800. In July they carried 1.2 million trips and issued 806 fines. The council’s own removal trial ended in March “as no budget or formal approval for it was set”, a gap Cllr Yates attributed to the spending review. Officers said Lime had now given the council access to its live dashboard, which Cllr Yates said it had been supposed to provide under the existing agreement. Cllr Austin, who arrived on a Lime bike, said he was meeting the borough police commander to plan an enforcement day on illegal fat bikes. The council will publish monthly figures on complaints, penalties and fines. No retrieval fee and no figure for operator income were given.

Lane rental. From May 2027 utilities digging up the busiest roads will pay a daily charge, forecast to raise £400,000 a year. The director of highways said the routes are set by TfL, not the council: “We have to play by that.” Which roads are covered was not stated.

The London Plan. The council’s response to the Mayor’s draft plan, which closes on 15 October, asks for “ultimate flexibility” on affordable housing tenure rather than the 70/30 social rent split, and opposes a housing target of 23,426 homes over ten years. Cllr Austin declared that he works in the property industry “with several developers that have sites within the borough”, then argued the case: “Fifty per cent of zero is still zero.” Cllr Will Sweet said the same: “Seventy per cent of nothing is nothing.” Cllr Hopkins said officers had shown the council could hit a 45 per cent affordable target on most major sites.

In questions to the Cabinet Member: the council’s position on Hammersmith Bridge is unchanged, “we will not support any structures fund bid for Hammersmith Bridge that does not open it to all traffic”; Chelsea Bridge, closed to lorries, is Kensington and Chelsea’s, and Cllr Austin will write asking for a timetable; Zipcar has left the borough, 66 of 133 car club bays are filled and four operators should be in place by December, with empty bays going to e-bike parking, hangars and charging points; a £175,000 government grant for cross-pavement charging cables, awarded last year, has not yet been spent, a delay he said “was not considered an urgent matter” by the previous administration; and the temporary lights north of Wandsworth Bridge came out on Monday, which he said had already eased Putney Bridge Road.

The committee does not meet again until 19 November.