What length of bus lane has been lost to cycle infrastructure
Request ID: FOI-1304-2122 Date published: 11 October 2021
You asked
Hi
Could you please tell me what length of bus lane has been lost to cycle lanes by year since 2015 and how much is in the planning stage to be lost.
We answered
TfL Ref: FOI-1304-2122
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 18th September 2021 asking for information about bus lanes and cycling infrastructure.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.
Specifically you asked:
“Could you please tell me what length of bus lane has been lost to cycle lanes by year since 2015 and how much is in the planning stage to be lost.”
This information has not previously been collated and there is no quick or efficient way of doing so. Your request is therefore being refused under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act. Under section 12, a public authority such as TfL is not obliged to provide information if it would cost more than £450 to determine if that information is held, and to then locate, retrieve or extract that information from elsewhere. This is calculated at a rate of £25 per hour, equivalent to one person working for 18 hours. In this case, the only way for us to source the information requested would be to look at each cycle lane scheme / bus lane record individually and try and calculate exactly where bus lanes have been lost. This is not as simple a task as it may appear, and would be complicated by the fact that in some cases bus lanes have been removed for cycle infrastructure but new ones put in elsewhere to replace them; because in some instances two bus lanes have been replaced with one long one; or because bus lanes have been shortened and split into two or three for cycle infrastructure. With c1200 bus lanes in our dataset we believe that sourcing the necessary data to respond would take well in excess of the 18 hour limit.
In order to bring your request within the costs limit you may wish to reframe it to narrow its scope, focussing on the information that is of most importance to you.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.
Yours sincerely,
David Wells FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
