Request ID: FOI-0523-2425 Date published: 23 May 2024
You asked
Dear Transport for London,
I am interested in gathering information regarding the TVM market and your operations. Could you kindly provide me with data about the following:
• The number of TVM machines you have acquired since 2015.
• The total number of TVM machines in your possession since 2015.
For the above two points, please indicate a breakdown indicating:
• TVM machines that exclusively accept cash.
• TVM machines that do not accept cash.
• TVM machines that accept both payment solutions mentioned above.
Furthermore, I would appreciate data on the following:
• The annual number of tickets sold since 2015
• A breakdown of ticket sales across different channels (TVM, service window, through an app) since 2015
Note: If not available since 2015, I'm happy with the earliest year you have.
We answered
TfL Ref: 0523-2425
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 14 May 2024 asking for information about TVMs and ticket sales.
Your request has been considered under the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and our information access policy.
I can confirm that we do hold the information you require. However, to provide the information you have requested would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.
Under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with requests if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information, locating and retrieving it and extracting it from other information would exceed the appropriate limit. In this instance, we estimate that the time required to answer your request would exceed 18 hours which, at £25 per hour (the rate stipulated by the Regulations), exceeds the ‘appropriate limit’.
There are multiple types of tickets machines, across all the different modes of transport, and these are all managed by different business areas within TfL. There is no central database showing all of the ticket machines in use, the type of ticket machine and the additional information you have requested including around the date they were acquired. Therefore to provide you with the information you have requested would require a manual stocktake exercise across multiple modes / stations.
To help bring the cost of responding to your requests within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider refining your requests to concentrate on matters which are important to you. For example, we anticipate that we would be able to provide the information you have requested for London Underground specifically as that data is held centrally and we would be able to collate that within the cost limit.
If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Sara Thomas FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
