Data drop – Taxi Ranks

Taxis are an important, trusted and iconic part of London’s transport system, and they also offer a vital service for disabled people. There are currently around 640 taxi ranks in the capital, serving key locations and one in five of all taxi journeys start at a rank. We have released the location of all London taxi ranks in our Unified API, allowing open data users to enhance or develop new apps and products for customers planning taxi journeys.

Taxi Ranks in the Places Unified API

You can get full list of Taxi Ranks from the Places API, which can also be searched by lat/long bounding box or radius.For each taxi rank, we return information such as the address, number of spaces, operation days, operation times, rank type and nearby stations NaPTAN id. The example below shows the taxi rank data for Queen Victoria Street (Blackfriars Station):

{

id: “TaxiRank_5920”,

url: “https://api.tfl.gov.uk/Place/TaxiRank_5920“,

commonName: “Queen Victoria Street (Blackfriars Station)”,

distance: 993.5842874985796,

placeType: “TaxiRank”,

additionalProperties: [

{

category: “Address”,

key: “Borough”,

sourceSystemKey: “5920”,

value: “City of London”,

modified: “2016-10-10T08:42:48.34Z”

},

{

category: “Description”,

key: “NumberOfSpaces”,

sourceSystemKey: “5920”,

value: “5”,

modified: “2016-10-10T08:42:48.34Z”

},

{

category: “Description”,

key: “OperationDays”,

sourceSystemKey: “5920”,

value: “Mon – Sun”,

modified: “2016-10-10T08:42:48.34Z”

},

{

category: “Description”,

key: “OperationTimes”,

sourceSystemKey: “5920”,

value: “21.00 – 02.00”,

modified: “2016-10-10T08:42:48.34Z”

},

{

category: “Description”,

key: “RankType”,

sourceSystemKey: “5920”,

value: “Working”,

modified: “2016-10-10T08:42:48.34Z”

},

{

category: “Description”,

key: “StationAtcoCode”,

sourceSystemKey: “5920”,

value: “940GZZLUBKF”,

modified: “2016-10-10T08:42:48.34Z”

}

],

childrenUrls: [ ],

lat: 51.511988,

lon: -0.103253

}…

The data for a taxi rank can also be retrieved by its place id. For example, the data for South Lambeth Place, Vauxhall can be retrieved by id TaxiRank_5533 using the following url:

https://api.tfl.gov.uk/Place/TaxiRank_5533

Feedback

We’d love to find out what you’re building with our taxi rank data, what’s most useful to you and if you feel anything important is missing from the Unified API. Please leave us your feedback, or any technical questions in the comments below.