TfL’s official figures claim I’m responsible for more than 1 in 4 of all bus shelter graffiti reports

I appear to be responsible for 28% of all graffiti reports at bus stops across London. Making those reports rather than placing the graffiti, I hasten to add. (But not reporting this sort of graffiti, of course.)

Over a quarter of all the graffiti reports across London are from me? Eek. (Double eek in fact, given I don’t restrict my reporting time just to bus shelters.)

If, that is, you believe Transport for London’s response to my freedom of information request about graffiti at bus shelters.

Long-time readers may remember I have some form on this subject, including discovering that it used to be the case that the phone number for reporting graffiti on bus shelters was not the phone number put on bus shelters.

This time, I was interested in how quickly graffiti gets removed as my impression has been that TfL has got much slower at doing this. It hasn’t, as far as I can find, said anything in public about deliberately introducing such as slow down in responses. So I thought I’d find out.

That was a bit of a dead-end as TfL’s response rather glosses over the cleaning times. But Tfl did provide this rather odd figure: that there were 172 reports of graffiti at bus shelters in 18/01/17 – 09/02/18.

This might seem slightly surprising when you realise there are around 19,500 bus stops in total. All the more so if you compare that 172 to my own volume of reports:

• My reports via Twitter during this date range: 45
• My reports via email during this date range: 3
• My reports as a proportion of the total: 28%

If I was standing for election, I’d be tempted to rush out the breaking news leaflet proclaiming that your hard-working local Liberal Democrats are responsible for taking up more than one in four of all bus shelter graffiti reports across the whole of London.

Instead, I’m going to ask TfL to think again about that number. I mean, I know I tweet a bit more than average, but – even allowing for my track record at volume reporting – surely this figure can’t be true…?