Request ID: FOI-2732-2122 Date published: 24 March 2022
You asked
Dear Transport for London,
Would it be possible to provide an aggregated dataset which describes routes taken between origin/destination, as obtained from the wifi (https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/privacy-and-cookies/wi-fi-data-collection) data.
Ideally as a CSV covering as long a period as practical - eg (illustrative example data from https://content.tfl.gov.uk/review-tfl-wifi-pilot.pdf page 41, not a restrictive format) Origin, Destination, Share, Route Kings Cross, Waterloo, 32, Kings Cross-Oxford Circus (Vic) Oxford Circus-Waterloo (Bakerloo) Kings Cross, Waterloo, 26.7, Kings Cross-Green Park (Vic) Green Park-Waterloo (Jubilee) ...
We answered
TfL Ref: 2732-2122
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 24 February 2022 asking for information about aggregated Wi-Fi route data. Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.
I can confirm that we do hold the information you require. However, to provide the information 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 requests if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information, then locating, retrieving 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’.
To explain further, the data that we collected as part of the Wi-Fi trial has not been specifically re-collected and so the information you have requested is not reportable in any direct manner. In order to collate the information you have requested we would need to undertake significant and bespoke extraction and analysis which would involve writing new code as well as analysing the outputs together with other data sets and verifying it, which would significantly exceed the cost limit under FOI.
In terms of advice and assistance that we are able to offer, the closest data we hold which may be of interest to you is our Rolling Origin and Destination Survey (RODS) dataset which has entry/exit information and is updated annually – 2021 data is due to be updated in April 2022. Please see the following link to our open data portal on our website: https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/open-data-users/our-open-data
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Sara Thomas FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
