Get crowding information

[daviduster]

When getting crowding information of a StopPoint (for example, using the crowding endpoint for getting information about South Kensington Underground, https://api.tfl.gov.uk/crowding/940GZZLUSKS), what does the value percentageOfBaseLine represent, is it an abstract unit? I can’t seem to find this in the documentation.

Also, South Kensington Underground is supposed to be closed until next year, so is this endpoint reliable?

[arturs]

@daviduster

Also, South Kensington Underground is supposed to be closed until next year, so is this endpoint reliable?

South Kensington is only closed to the Piccadilly line while the escalators down to those platforms are replaced. The station itself is still open, and Circle and District line trains still stop at platforms 1 and 2.

Though I believe that even if the station was closed, crowding information would still be available despite the lack of passengers, as the crowding API currently uses historical WiFi connection data. TfL do however plan on releasing near real-time data in the summer of this year, so at that point the crowding info would likely reflect any closures.
(source: New WiFi data API)

Unfortunately I am not aware of exact what the percentageOfBaseLine value represents and have been struggling to figure it out myself. Perhaps @jwithers could be of some help here, as they announced the availability of the crowding API.

[daviduster]

Thanks for your answer, I have also suffered trying to find out, I thought it would be a percentage whose total sum would give 1 in a day or in a week, but seems like no!

[jwithers]

Hi @daviduster

The value percentageOfBaseLine represents how busy the station is at a given time, as a proportion of the busiest the station has been since data collection began (July 2019).

Does this make sense?

Here are the two Tech Forum posts I have put out on crowding data:

New WiFi data API

Hi, I’m excited to announce we have a new API available, giving historic occupancy data at a station level, for nearly all tube stations. Here’s some additional information: Data source: Historic anonymised and aggregated Wi-Fi connection data provides an enhanced understanding of how customers move through London Underground stations and the network. The data is limited to the London Underground network only and provides the busyness of individual stations as a whole. This is calculated by…

Data drop: near-real-time crowding data API

In addition to the historical crowding data we released earlier this year, we’ve now released near-real-time crowding data. This calculates busyness at a station level every 5 minutes, as a fraction of the busiest the station has been since data collection began (July 2019). The data covers all tube stations apart from Kensington Olympia, Heathrow Terminal 5 and Willesden Junction. We also consider Monument the same station as Bank for the purposes of crowding so don’t provide separate data for …

Hope this helps, if you have any more questions just let me know

[mjcarchive]

So if the station manages a new Personal Best (unlikely at the moment, perhaps) all the values get revised in both historic and real-time datasets? Would there be a time lag before the “renormalisation” is done?