I would like to know if you could help or provide me with some guidance. I am a final year Human Geography student carrying out my dissertation. The title of my project is “Smart ticketing of public transport in London: which UK city has potential to follow?”, therefore I am using TfL as my case study. I am searching for some ticket data and if possible, looking for the number of tickets sold for each of the following methods: Oyster, Contactless, Travelcards, Visitor Oyster, Paper tickets and Bus & Tram passes, for the past 10 years. Furthermore, the number of tickets sold for each method in each month of these years.

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Dear

Our ref: FOI-4852-1718

       

Thank you for your request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 26 February 2018.

Your request has been processed in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.

Unfortunately, to provide you with 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.

We have estimated that it would exceed the cost limit to provide a response to your current request as the requested information isn’t held centrally and cannot be easily reported on. It would take a vast amount of staff time to try to locate and collate this ticket data for all requested ticketing types for the past 10 years, as well as a monthly breakdown for each.

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 locate, retrieve and extract the information you are seeking. 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 Transport for London. 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 shorter period of time, geographical area or specific departments of TfL.

Although your request can take the form of a question, rather than a request for specific documents, TfL does 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.

We publish a lot of information about the use of Oyster cards and Contactless Payment cards on our website which you may find helpful.

Please see the following:

https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/oyster-card

https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/contactless-payment

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

Yours sincerely

Eva Hextall

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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