I was wondering if there were any station usage figures (entries and exits) available for stations on the Underground, DLR, Overground, Tram, TFL Rail and River Boat services? The most recent data from data.london.gov.uk is from 2017 and I was wondering if more recent figures were available. As an aside, are there figures available for Out of Station Interchanges (OSIs)? The request is for a piece of university coursework I am doing on railway usage and I would prefer it to be in the form of a spreadsheet if possible.

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TfL Ref:         FOI-1760-2021

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 2nd December 2020 asking for station usage figures for various TfL modes.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we do hold the information you require. You asked:

I was wondering if there were any station usage figures (entries and exits) available for stations on the Underground, DLR, Overground, Tram, TFL Rail and River Boat services?

The most recent data from data.london.gov.uk is from 2017 and I was wondering if more recent figures were available.

Please find attached the most recent daily entry and exit figures (since start of 2020) for all rail modes including London Underground, London Overground, DLR, TfL Rail, Trams, and London River Services.

Please note the following:

PVALs = Passenger Validator (bi-directional card readers on a standalone plinths, rather than directional gates, most common at DLR, Tram and River services); contactless taps on PVALs do not get recorded as entries or exits, due to the way journeys are constructed in the ticketing system back office.
IVALs – Intermediate Validation – some taps at some stations get recorded as IVAL instead of entries and exits; we are unable to determine in the data we have available whether these constituted an entry or an exit at the time.

In accordance with our obligations under Data Protection legislation, counts of less than five have been removed from the data as required by section 40(2) of the FOI Act. This is because disclosure of this personal data would be a breach of the legislation, specifically the first principle of Article 5 of the General Data Protection Regulation which requires all processing of personal data to be fair and lawful. It would not be fair to disclose this personal information when the individuals have no expectation it would be disclosed and TfL has not satisfied one of the conditions which would make the processing ‘fair’.

This exemption to the right of access to information is an absolute exemption and not subject to an assessment of whether the public interest favours use of the exemption.

As an aside, are there figures available for Out of Station Interchanges (OSIs)?

Between 26 October and 21 December 2020 more than 6.5m journeys involved an out of station interchange (OSI). Note that this includes both Oyster and contactless payment card journeys. We have only covered the last eight weeks as we do not hold Oyster data going back further, due to data retention rules.

Attached is a spreadsheet which shows more detail about the journeys with an OSI. Unfortunately, due to the way the data is collated we are unable to identify exactly where the OSI took place.

If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for some reason, please feel free to contact me.

If you are considering submitting a further FOI request please think carefully about whether the request is essential at this current time, as answering FOI requests will require the use of limited resources and the attention of staff who could be supporting other essential activity. Where requests are made, please note that our response time may be impacted by the current situation.

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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