New WiFi data API

1

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 comparing recent travel data with the data from the busiest week the station has experienced since we started capturing WiFi data in July 2019. The data is categorised against a busyness scale to provide a busyness value and identify the quieter times.

The data gives us a better understanding of crowding, collective travel patterns and changes over time to understand how our customers use our stations.

How TfL is using this data:

To support our demand management campaigns we are using the data to promote to our customers the quiet times at all London Underground stations to help them plan their journeys. We have clearly identified and distinguished the quiet times for our busiest stations using bar charts on individual station web pages and our TfL Go app.

This supports our objectives of spreading demand across the day and our network.

During national lockdown measures, we are using the data to help customers identify quiet times to travel to ensure that social distancing can be maintained.

As restrictive measures ease, it will still be important to continue to reassure customers and provide them with information that helps them plan journeys at quiet times and make the most of the network’s capacity.

How we would like you to represent the data:

Please focus on the quiet times at the stations, rather than busy times or the peaks.

We hope that customers will use this information to retime their journeys to quieter times and avoid busy times at their origin, interchange or destination stations.

Having access to quiet times at London Underground stations can enhance our shared customer’s journey and during the current national restrictions is a useful tool to help maintain social distancing.

If you have any more questions about the data, please let me know.

Joe

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2

Thanks.

I did think that TfL should make an “employer tool”:

  • employer loads up the postcode of their site or office;

  • employer loads the postcodes and/or starting stations of their staff (without personally identifiable information).

  • desired length of working day (with lunch, say)

tool tells the employer the best time to open their site/office based on the travel-in and travel-out times of the staff, showing the best time to start and end the working day.

3

Hi Joe,
Im assuming the “Day of week” api is the crowding data from the current week we are in? If so, is it possible to get the data from previous weeks?

4

Hi @data_project_tfl

It’s an average taken over multiple historic weeks, rather than the data from any one particular week. Hope this helps

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