Request ID: FOI-2469-2122 Date published: 21 February 2022
You asked
I would like a full list of all Boris Bikes that were missing and were then found outside of the Greater London county border.
The list should include:
• The bike number.
• The date it went missing.
• The date it was found.
• The location (city/town/village name and county name) where it was found.
Please provide this information for the period of between now and when the Boris Bikes were first introduced.
We answered
TfL Ref: FOI-2469-2122
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 29 January 2022, asking for information about Santander Cycles recovered outside of London.
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 some of 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 a request if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information, and locating, 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’. This is because we would have to manually go through thousands of records one by one to identify all missing bicycles which were found outside of London. We have recovered some 67,498 bikes between 2013/14 and July 2021 (we not hold comprehensive, accurate data for the years 2010-2012, we can only report on missing bikes from 2013 onwards). We would then need to extract and collate all of this information.
However, we are able to confirm that bikes have been recovered from the following locations:
Southend
Cornwall
Brighton
Bikes in Cornwall, Brighton and Southend were recovered with the support of British Transport Police.
There have also been very rare occasions when bikes have been reported outside of the UK, this includes:
Republic of Ireland
Turkey
Gambia
Australia
Jamaica
Romania
Turkey
The bike identified in the Republic of Ireland was recovered with the support of the Irish Garda.
If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Eva Hextall
FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
