TfL Open Data & Unified API
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means
Transport for London publishes real-time transport data through a free Unified API — more than 80 feeds at the time of the 2017 review — covering the Tube, buses, roads and cycle hire. A July 2017 Deloitte study commissioned by TfL valued the open-data policy at up to £130m a year in economic benefits and time savings, with over 13,000 registered developers and more than 600 apps used by 42% of Londoners.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →📊 Impact
Deloitte (July 2017) estimated up to £130m/year in economic benefits and savings, against a TfL cost of about £1m/year to publish the data — and roughly 500 direct jobs plus 230 in the supply chain. Self-commissioned figures.
🎓 Lesson
Publishing raw feeds openly, rather than building official apps, let a third-party developer ecosystem deliver journey tools at a fraction of the cost of doing it in-house.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “TfL Open Data & Unified API” — London, United Kingdom. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/london-tfl-open-data/ (last verified 2026-07-17). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.