Car Park Utilisation at Cockfosters Underground Station
Request ID: FOI-2977-2324 Date published: 15 December 2023
You asked
Please provide daily utilisation figures for cars using this facility over calendar year 2023. Ideally, I am requesting separate daily figures of normal and blue badge vehicles to see how these correlate with holiday periods. I understand that the operator has changed from NCP to Saba but I would hope this series can now be readily provided by Saba. Alternatively, total numbers of daily, weekly and monthly tickets are requested. This data has previously been provided in FOI 2516-2223 for 1/4/22 to 9/1/23.
We answered
Our Ref: FOI-2977-2324
Thank you for your request received on 18 November 2023 asking for information about car park utilisation at Cockfosters Station. Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy. I can confirm we do hold the information you require. As you are aware, the car park operator changed from NCP to Saba UK in January this year. Unfortunately, due to the way this information is recorded, to provide the figures you have requested broken down by month, week or day would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450 set by the FOI (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. In order to provide a more detailed breakdown we would have to manually review and extract thousands of rows of data sets coming from multiple sources (payment machine transactions, mobile, app, web etc) over the requested time period, which would exceed the cost limit. However, we are able to provide the number of transactions (regular and blue badge) each financial period since Saba UK became the operator of the car park which we hope you will find useful. The dates each period cover is also provided in the table below.
2022-23
2023-24
Payment Type
8/1/23-4/2/23
5/2/23-4/3/23
5/3/23-31/3/23
1/4/23-29/4/23
30/4/23-27/5/23
28/5/23-24/6/23
25/6/23-22/7/23
23/7/23-19/8/23
20/8/23-16/9/23
17/9/23-14/10/23
15/10/23-11/11/23
Total
Blue Badge
405
424
400
447
435
386
422
481
393
426
403
4,622
Standard
8,210
8,410
7,764
8,389
8,377
8,035
8,946
8,472
7,197
8,601
7,963
90,364
Total
8,615
8,834
8,164
8,836
8,812
8,421
9,368
8,953
7,590
9,027
8,366
94,986
Please note, this data is derived from the number of individual parking tickets – including daily, weekly and monthly tickets - sold. As individual parking bays can be used by several different vehicles on any given day the information shows how many tickets were sold during each period rather than often the car park was used
To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider narrowing its scope so that we can more easily provide the information you are seeking. If this is not the information you are looking for please do not hesitate to contact me. Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal. Yours sincerely
Gemma Jacob Senior FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
