Historic Santander Cycle occupancy data?

Hi all,

Does anyone know of a dataset for historic occupancy / station-fill data for Santander Cycles? If not, is this something that could be made to be open data? It would look like:

  • Station ID
  • Nbr bikes
  • Nbr empty
  • Some regular time-stamp index (e.g. every n minutes)

Real-time data is obviously available on the open API, but not a historic record (like those available for journey data) to my knowledge.

Reason for asking:
This is quite an important aspect of my MSc thesis project, and I had been counting on logging several months of data from the API. However, the covid-19 outbreak has affected usage of the system and this might derail my project somewhat as I’ve only managed to gather a month or so of data. Any help would be very gratefully received.

FYI I’m not actually the first person to ask but the previous person didn’t get a solution.

Welcome @Peppers16

I take it the data isn’t in this dataset http://crowding.data.tfl.gov.uk/ ?

Otherwise, I guess you’ll have to start a cron job to pick up the current live usage data for each using a round-robin?

Hi @briantist, thanks for the reply. No, I don’t believe that the crowding data contains bike occupancy.
Yes, I currently have a cron job logging real-time data and had counted on using it, but unfortunately the coronavirus outbreak has affected usage of the system, so I only got to log about a month or two of ‘useful’ data before people stopped coming into London for work. As it stands, the system isn’t going to return to normal between now and my report submission.

I think what I really need is to appeal to somebody at TfL to ask whether this is data that could be pulled for a project (it’s worth a shot). I’m not sure what the best contact point is: presumed it was this forum.

@Peppers16

Indeed, it is going to be a while. I would suspect that if you want to make a specific request like you have, then do it to the TfL “Freedom Of Information” portal at Freedom of Information - Transport for London

However, the ongoing CV situation means that public bodies are asking for FoI request to not be made.

If you could be sure that the data you want is sitting on a existing place somewhere (say, you had seen it on someone’s screen somewhere) you might stand some chance. However, I would suspect that your request might be a little bit complex to collect.

The last request I made was for a list of station with “keep left” or “keep right” and that got knocked back for being too complex!

Perhaps a third party (Santander?) as the data you want?