Tube Data

[jaz...@hotmail.co.uk]

Hi all,

 

Does anyone know if it is possible to get data on volumes of flows (of passengers) through particular underground stations? Do TFL publish this? I assume that 'Oyster Card' data is not freely accessible by the public?

 

Thanks!

 

Jasmin

[Richard Milton]

The TfL Oyster Card data is definitely not public. I had an interesting conversation with some people from TfL after the Barbican event that left me realising that it's unlikely to be public anywhere in the near future. It's not just a case of releasing it, there are immense technical problems in accessing the real-time system that is used to make it work at the station barriers. There is also a security and privacy issue, so we're only ever likely to see anonymised blocks of sample data for now.

 

There is data on station in/out records released by TfL on their developer site:

 

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/businessandpartners/syndication/16493.aspx

 

Have a look at the following datasets which might be useful. You have to register with them first, but it's usually quite quick to do.

 

Oyster Card Journey Information (5%)

Rolling Origin and Destination Survey

London Underground Passenger Counts

 

On a related note, they released some data on Oyster Card overcharging by station which I plotted on MapTube:

 

http://www.maptube.org/map.aspx?s=DBHFGlUxZ8sKGBJ0wQR8HAwKdVwKJwwQM8HAwKdVwKFiwUDAqVwMCnVcCjeN

 

If you look at the stations where people were overcharged most (i.e. touch out failed), then it follows what we would expect from numbers of people exiting. In other words, if you say that Oyster always works 99% of the time, the overcharge is just this times the number of people using the station.

[Jasmin]

Excellent, thank you very much for your help with this! It only took a few minutes to register and receive links to the data. Clever idea about how to use the Oyster Card overcharging data too!

[Jasmin]

Sorry, I've just got another quick question  - do you know if anyone has done anything on working out the catchment area of a tube station? Other than if Oyster Card data was avaible (and everyone registered their card), I can't think how this could be done....

On Tuesday, 22 October 2013 10:20:27 UTC+1, Richard Milton wrote:

[Richard Milton]

I can't think of anybody calculating catchment areas for tubes. I'm not sure how you would go about that as transfers from National Rail to tube would be interesting to handle. That's assuming you knew where the commuters started from in the first place. This might be something that you could use modelling for, as there must be some data saying how many people commute from every London ward to every other London ward, so you might be able to simulate something to within a certain level of error. This isn't really my area though.

 

The only other related thing I can think of are the travel time maps where you pick a point on the underground and draw a contour map showing how long it takes to get from there to everywhere else. It's not really a catchment area though. I think the transfer between different modes of transport really confuses everything.

On Tuesday, 22 October 2013 09:25:16 UTC+1, Jasmin wrote:

[Jasmin]

Thank you! Yes, the different modes of transport certainly makes it tricky! Very good ideas though -  I will give it a go.