Richmond councillors have refused plans to speed up the SL7 Superloop and the 285 bus through Hampton, Hampton Hill and Teddington.
The borough’s Transport and Air Quality Committee refused £50,000 of design work on bus-priority measures when it met on Monday 9 November. Its decision notice, published on 10 November, says the committee “resolved to refuse the recommendations contained in the officer’s report”. The notice gives no reason for the refusal, and the minutes of the meeting have not yet been published.
The officers’ report had asked the committee to approve design work on bus-priority measures for the SL7 and parts of the 285 and N285 routes. It also asked for officers to open talks with Transport for London about extra SL7 stops “at locations to be agreed”. The committee refused all of the recommendations, so neither the design work nor the talks will go ahead on the strength of this report.
The £50,000 budget, paid for by a TfL grant, would have covered design work only, not construction. The report listed three schemes: a feasibility design for kerbside waiting and loading restrictions on the A312 Uxbridge Road in Hampton and the A313 Park Road in Hampton Hill and Teddington; a wider pavement at the Kingston-bound stop on the A313 Ferry Road in Teddington, with changes to waiting and loading rules on the other side of the road; and waiting and loading controls on the A309 Park Road in Teddington to help buses get round the pedestrian islands.
It also covered detailed design and traffic surveys for banned turns at the A311 High Street and A313 Hampton Road and Park Road signals, to ease queues on the approaches.
The report said the measures most likely to work in an outer borough are longer hours or more days for existing bus lanes, new or longer waiting and loading restrictions at the kerb, and traffic signals that give buses a “hurry-up” call at junctions. Any new restrictions would have gone out to statutory public consultation before a decision.
TfL figures in the report show how slow the buses are. Across each whole route, the SL7 averaged 12.31mph and carried 3,898,504 passengers in 2024/25, while the 285 averaged 10.34mph and carried 3,930,876 passengers. The night service N285 averaged 16.04mph with 163,566 passengers. Together, the SL7 and 285 carried almost 7.8 million passengers in 2024/25.
The SL7 runs between West Croydon and Heathrow Central bus station, crossing five outer London boroughs. In Richmond it stops just once, at a pair of stops in Broad Street, Teddington, passing straight through everywhere else in Hampton and Teddington. The council has been lobbying TfL for additional stops in Hampton and Hampton Hill, and a separate bus-stop audit considered at the same meeting noted a request for a stop in Hampton Hill or Fulwell.
For drivers and residents on Uxbridge Road, Park Road and Ferry Road, nothing changes. The refusal means no design work on new yellow lines, loading bans or banned turns under this report. For SL7 passengers, the buses keep running as now: TfL, not the council, runs the route and decides where it stops.
The council remains able to make other representations to TfL, and the decision does not determine what will happen to the funding.
It is the second time this week a London council has pushed back on TfL bus plans. Lambeth Council has said it will formally oppose TfL’s proposal to withdraw the 415 bus, which runs between Tulse Hill and Old Kent Road, with the consultation closing on Sunday 15 November. Wandsworth, meanwhile, has asked TfL for £200,000 towards moving a pedestrian crossing on Putney Bridge.
