New transport chief turns up to watch Putney phone box removed

It’s not every day a journalist, a cabinet member and an MP’s comms officer all turn up to watch a phone box get removed. On Thursday morning, all three did.

Workers began cutting the derelict BT phone box out of the pavement outside TK Maxx at around 9.30am, ending its two-year run as the thing blocking the bus layby at Bus Stop M. Putney.news was there taking pictures. So, separately, was a member of Fleur Anderson’s team. And so, unannounced, was Cllr Nick Austin, appointed Wandsworth’s cabinet member for transport less than a day earlier, on the same evening Robert Morritt was confirmed as council leader.

Austin stopped for a chat. He said the bike lanes on Putney Bridge Road are already coming out, the traffic island opposite Snappy Snaps goes next month, and bus layby works start during the summer, all timed around the school holidays. He put a number on what it’s meant to buy: an extra 11 cars through the lights on Lower Richmond Road per green cycle, once TfL agrees to rebalance the signal timings.

The 11 cars per cycle is what this is all about. Despite a seemingly endless series of tweaks at the now-loathed Putney Bridge junction, the traffic is still backing up a mile every morning on Lower Richmond Road and Putney Bridge Road. It is unbearable, and has been for over a year. The North-South corridor – the bridge to the High Street – is the road protected above all others because that’s where no less than seven bus lines pass through. And TfL controls the streets. And the signal timing.

The new Conservative administration is doing all it can in the hope that it will work. If the buses can pull in at Bus Stop M maybe, just maybe, the traffic will flow enough that the traffic lights can be changed to let more cars out of the other junction’s entry points. Rather than 45 minutes to get over the bridge at rush hour, could we get it down to 20?

It is the single biggest change left and a lot is riding on it. Which is why we are standing there taking pictures as Luke and Danny do the actual cutting and hauling, somewhat bemused by their new-found audience.

Despite the political blood-letting of the past week, which will have its own repercussions later on, having Cllr Austin as cabinet member for transport could not come at a better time for Putney: he lives just off the High Street and so has suffered along with the rest of us. The same could not be said for previous administration members who seemed permanently surprised and confused at the level of frustration among residents.

Yelling over the noise of Danny’s pneumatic drill, we walk through all the minutiae of the junction. The council is determined not to tear up the new redesign – even though that remains the obvious solution. The latest argument is health and safety requirements: minimum spaces needed for buggies to cross. Cllr Austin has asked exactly what they are: if they are three feet and we have five feet, do we need the extra two feet, he posits? He’s only been in the job a few hours but it’s clear this is one thorny issue he’s prepared to grasp.

We point out the fact that the junction is relying on dumb technology: metal plates in the ground and traffic lights with chips that have to be manually programmed, when modern camera systems and AI are being piloted by TfL elsewhere in London, and have been running successfully in the US for several years. A dynamic junction could squeeze anything up to another 20 per cent of traffic through it. He asks us to send information.

None of this is new territory. The island removal was already part of the council’s own gridlock plan announced so long ago now that you have to wonder why it’s still there.

The plan to take away the bicycle wands on the Putney Bridge Road entry to the junction – and so remove a barely used lane – is new and already happening.

At this pace, the promise to “look at” removing a pedestrian crossing may actually happen, rather than serve as yet one more tactic to buy time – something council officers have become increasingly guilty of.

It does make you wonder though: buy time until what exactly? Putney residents just throw in the towel and decide they are cyclists after all? Some of the proclamations coming from councillors who until recently sat on the transport committee would suggest yes, that’s exactly the plan. We all just have to get over ourselves.

All politics, as they say, is local; but local politics sometimes work at the street level.

Meanwhile, Luke was using a spade to remove chunks of concrete while Danny chiselled away, eventually attaching a crane to its top. Three more iterations of spade, chisel, pull later and the rusty metal shell containing yesterday’s technology is finally free, lifted and lowered down on the truck bed.

All that was left then was some tidying up, sand, concrete and new slabs and this corner of the High Street was finally free of its impediment. A small, ordinary bit of Putney finally got fixed, some actual progress for once, albeit with more witnesses than it deserved.