Dear Transport for London, Can you please provide me all bus route records? These route records will normally contain the line of bus routes from stand to stand both directions, official curtailment points and light running routes from bus depot. For each bus route, they would normally be in a PDF format.

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Our ref: FOI-0640-1920/GH

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 1 June 2019 asking for bus route records.

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, we are refusing your request under section 14(1) of the Act. Generating a route record from BusNet is a manual process which can only be done on an individual route basis – therefore taking a period of time to generate, convert to a PDF and save. For one route this isn’t obviously a very onerous process, but to generate route records for all 800 or so routes on the network would take some considerable time, and therefore we consider that providing the requested information would place an unreasonable burden on us. Our principal duty is to provide an effective transport service for London and we consider that answering this request would represent a disproportionate effort. It would be a significant distraction from our work managing the TfL network, requiring re-allocation of already limited resources and placing an unacceptable burden on a small number of personnel. We do wish to clarify that whilst we consider that your request falls under section 14(1) of the FOI Act, this does not reflect a conclusion that it has been your intention to deliberately place an undue burden on our resources.

We would also need to consider whether any exemptions should apply to the information within these records, as commercially sensitive information may need to be withheld for certain routes, particularly if the route is up for retender. 

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) guidance states that one of the indicators of a request which may fall under section 14(1) is that it “appears to be part of a completely random approach, lacks any clear focus, or seems to have been solely designed for the purpose of ‘fishing’ for information without any idea of what might be revealed.”

The ICO guidance provides the following examples of a ‘fishing expedition’ request which may fall under section 14(1) if it:

- Imposes a burden by obliging the authority to sift through a substantial volume of information to isolate and extract the relevant details;

- Encompasses information which is only of limited value because of the wide scope of the request;

- Creates a burden by requiring the authority to spend a considerable amount of time considering any exemptions and redactions.

Our view is that all three of these examples apply in this instance.

If you would like to re-submit a more focused, specific request then we will, of course, consider it. For example, a request for specific bus route records is less likely to raise concerns about the disproportionate effort required to answer it.

If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Graham Hurt

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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