FOI request detail

Route 481

Request ID: FOI-2815-1819
Date published: 20 March 2019

You asked

- How many people are on each bus, an what the capacity of the bus -I would like the figures for the last twelve months broken down into one-month blocks -To cover Monday to Friday only -Between 7-9am and 3-5pm - For each bus stop between the following points, and in each direction -Between 'PI' Wood Street and 'F' Twickenham Station' Or a copy of more comprehensive data, if this will enable us to extract the same information.

We answered

TfL Ref: 2815-1819 2816-1819 2817-1819 and 2818-1819

Thank you for your four requests received by Transport for London (TfL) on 19 February 2019 asking for information about bus routes 481, 110, 111 and H22.

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.

Unfortunately, to provide all of 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, locating and retrieving it and 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.

To extract the data you have requested would require an individual to run our reporting process multiple times to get the result out to meet the specification as set out in the FOI.  We estimate that it would take about 192 runs of our process across the 4 routes you have asked about. On average each of these runs take about 10 minutes of an individual’s time which is comprised of the following type of activity:  set the parameters for the run, process the report and to then check the output.  This would equate to 32 hours work which would considerably exceed the limit. This assumes that everything runs smoothly. 

As this overall cost exceeds the £450 limit, we are therefore applying Regulation 5(1) of the Freedom of Information (FOI) and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, which permits us to take into account requests made by the same person which relate, to any extent, to the same or similar information.

Please note any further requests that we receive within a 60 working day timeframe may also be subject to consideration under Section 12 of FOI.

To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to prioritise the information you have requested. We believe it would be possible to provide a smaller subset of the data you have asked for and we could provide a single month’s average weekday load at bus stop by the time periods specified.  You could select the month you particularly are interested in or we could provide it for a neutral month (ie one where the network is not impacted by bank holidays, school holidays, etc). Please let me know if you would like to submit a revised request for this information.

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

Yours sincerely

Sara Thomas

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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