Bus Ridership per route or individual bus id with timestamps and date
Request ID: FOI-3074-2223 Date published: 14 March 2023
You asked
I would like to request data for Bus ridership (touch in) per route/bus id with timestamps and relevant date. Preferably for the last 5 years, but 1 year will suffice if that is not possible. Ideally this would be structured data in a csv format, depicting all touch in data for each bus route or bus id throughout the year.
I am doing a data science project for my dissertation and having this dataset would be perfect.
If any additional information could be provided that would be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks
We answered
TfL Ref: 3074-2223
Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 19 February 2023 asking for information about bus ridership 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 hold the information you require. You asked for:
data for Bus ridership (touch in) per route/bus id with timestamps and relevant date. Preferably for the last 5 years, but 1 year will suffice if that is not possible. Ideally this would be structured data in a csv format, depicting all touch in data for each bus route or bus id throughout the year.
I am doing a data science project for my dissertation and having this dataset would be perfect.
Unfortunately it is not possible to provide this information within the cost limit for responding to FOI cases, as set out under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act. Under section 12, TfL is not obliged to provide information if it would cost more than £450 to determine if the information is held, and to then locate, retrieve or extract it from elsewhere. This is calculated at a rate of £25 per hour, equivalent to 18 hours work. The exemption applies in this instance due to the enormous volume of information covered in your request.
To explain further, if we were to provide boarding and alighting information for each individual date, route, bus vehicle and stop (timestamp), the file would contain over 3.5 million rows worth of data and that’s just for one day. If we were to extract this for one or five years, this would amount to ~1,277 million rows of data for one year and ~6,387 million rows of data for five years, respectively.
Additionally, we can confirm that the extraction, cleansing, sense-checking and dispatching of these datasets given their sheer volume would require several weeks of work. There would also be the practical challenges of how to forward such a high volume of data.
To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to consider narrowing the scope of your request so that we can more easily locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking. For example by considering the following options:
Requesting the number of boarding passengers by route-direction-stop as total per time of day (AM peak, interpeak, PM peak), as an average from several representative weekdays in November 2019, as well as for November 2022.
Limiting the data you are seeking to one bus route and for one month
If you want to refine your request or make a Freedom of Information Act request in future, please bear in mind that the Freedom of Information Act allows you to request recorded information held by us. You should identify the information that you want as clearly and concisely as you can, specifying the types of document that you are looking for. You might also consider limiting your request to a particular period of time, geographical area or specific departments of the organisation.
Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, we do not have to answer your question if it would require the creation of new information or the provision of a judgement, explanation, advice or opinion that was not already recorded at the time of your request.
If any additional information could be provided that would be greatly appreciated.
We haveattached a Weekday Passenger Data excel spreadsheet for the month of June 2022, which provides a snapshot of the number of boarders and alighters at each bus stop that we may be of interest.
Please also note the following factors to consider with the dataset provided:
Some stops are only used at specific times of the day or week, or only during special events such as for concerts, or rail replacement services. These may be missed from a snapshot dataset, as this is dependent on the date range that is used.
There are also some technical issues which have affected the extraction of data, for example the zero boarders and alighter figures at Abbey Wood Station.
Data shown in rows 19717 to 19720 represent bus stops that are used only at the first stop of their respective routes at Golders Green and Liverpool Street stations, hence why only boarding figures are shown. The dataset system we use makes sure that boarding only stops do not show any alighters that have disembarked, and vice versa
Every route has its own scaling factor for each hour of the day it operates, so stops that only have demand some of the time will still get included. Furthermore, if there was one person boarding at a bus stop on a Friday, for example, and our data extraction covers a weekday average of Monday to Friday, then the final boarding figure will be a fraction less than one, but greater than zero because we have divided by the total number of weekdays to get an average weekday figure.
The attached passenger data for June 2022, shows that there were 117 stops that genuinely have zero boarders and alighters. Of these, 77 were Hail and Ride stops; unfortunately boarders and alighters are not accurately captured on the iBus ticket machines for Hail & Ride, given that passengers can board and disembark anywhere along these parts of the journey. Demand is instead allocated to the next fixed stop along the route.
Bus stops at Mortlake Station and Threadneedle Street are served only by very low frequency routes. Mortlake Station is served by bus number 969 which only operates on Tuesdays and Fridays, whilst Night Bus service N242 serves Threadneedle Street.
Given that we manage a bus fleet of around 9,300 vehicles, operating across 675 routes, which undergo various changes throughout the year such as temporary bus stop closures, diversions, curtailments, or other operational reasons, our software systems can sometimes encounter difficulties in updating and incorporating the impact of these changes as they occur, especially when at short notice, which can lead to some data failures in places. For example, Abbey Wood Station is shown as having zero boarders and alighters, due to technical errors involved with extracting such considerable volumes of data from across the London Buses network and various software systems involved in formulating this data.
Supplementary to the spreadsheet, Transport for London also publishes the Travel in London reports, which provide comprehensive research on travel patterns across various modes of transport, including of course, buses.
Examples of studies and overviews featured can be found in chapters covering topics such as ‘average weekday demand’ graphs, ‘journey stage estimates’ and ‘passenger demand trends’ by using ‘buses’ in the keyword search facility. We publish these reports annually via the following link: https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/travel-in-london-reports
If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for any reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.
Yours sincerely
Jasmine Howard FOI Case Officer FOI Case Management Team General Counsel Transport for London
