FOI request detail

Bus Mileage Charts

Request ID: FOI-1193-1920
Date published: 13 August 2019

You asked

I request all mileage charts for prefixed routes (A1-X99) showing a list of bus stops and the mileage between them.

We answered

TfL Refs: FOI-1188-1920 to FOI-1193-1920

Thank you for your requests received by Transport for London (TfL) on 24th July 2019 asking for information about the mileage between bus stops.

Your requests have been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.  Note that your requests have been aggregated and are being addessed as one, as permitted under section 12(4) of the FOI Act. This section of the Act applies where the requests have been made by one person; are for the same or similar information; where they have been received within any period of 60 consecutive working days, and; where the cost of compliance is being considered.

I can confirm that we hold the requested information. However, to provide it all 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 a request if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information, and then locating, retrieving or extracting it from other information, would exceed the appropriate limit. This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described – equivalent to 18 hours work. Your requests cover almost six hundred separate routes. To comply with the requests would require the information to be sourced at a rate of more than one route every two minutes. We do not believe that this is achievable (our estimate is that it would take at least 50 hours in total – and this assumes that the information for every such route has already been calculated and is readily to hand).

To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider narrowing or reframing its scope so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking. However, that said, you should note that section 21 of the FOI Act also provides an exemption to the release of information where it is already reasonably accessible to the applicant by other means. TfL publishes maps of all bus routes in London via our website, which can be found via the link here:

https://tfl.gov.uk/maps/bus

This information can be used to locate different routes on applications such as Google Maps, which also shows all bus stops and which includes a measurement tool (right click, select ‘measure distance’, and then left click to measure the distance between two points).

If you choose to re-submit a request, it should therefore be for information that is not already readily available elsewhere.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely,

David Wells

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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