Transport for London’s inconsistent approach to data transparency continues.
A few weeks back I noted how the cable car passenger numbers have started vanishing, week by week, from TfL’s website.
Without any public notice, TfL adopted a policy of only publishing 52 weeks of figures at any time, making it harder to compare the most recent passenger numbers with the same period the year before.
“The result of this little wheeze is that a causal observer visiting the site today won’t be able to see that although 37,534 passengers used the tourist attraction last week, the figure is 43,000 less than in the same week last year.”
Obviously those of us who distrust TfL when it comes to the consistent release of data had kept copies of the older figures, but their decision to slowly remove past weeks never quite felt in compliance with Boris’s past commitment.
When told last week that the removal from the site of the TfL Chief Office expenses for January – March was an mistake, I asked whether the same might be true of the vanishing cable car stats.
The official press office response was “It is not an error, the Emirates Air Line passenger numbers are published in a rolling 12 month period.”
Either TfL has a very iffy calendar or the policy has been silently tweaked because as of today the website now lists every week between 30th June 2012 and 3rd August 2013.
Let’s hope this is the last time TfL tries to unpublish data after it was placed in the public domain.
