My colleague Ross has passed on your email to me for a response because I work with the Assembly's Transport Committee.

To clarify, the Transport Committee's report on bus services set out the 10 most crowded bus routes as cited in a survey of around 1,000 people using buses in London. In effect, these routes give an indication of passengers' experiences of crowding on certain bus routes but as the survey was self-selecting and not based on responses from all bus passengers in London these findings do not necessarily capture all incidents of crowding on all bus routes in the capital. It is TfL which collects data about the entire bus network and should be able to provide more information about crowding levels on all bus routes.

From existing published TfL data covering the entire bus network, the Transport Committee was able to identify the 10 most used bus routes in London but could not accurately determine from this data the most crowded bus routes. As per your observations about the TfL data, the ten most used routes are not necessarily the most crowded because they may have more bus vehicles allocated to them than other routes to address their greater number of passengers.

As you will see from the Transport Committee's report, the Transport Committee commented in detail on the fact that TfL did not have a set measure of crowding on bus routes and did not publish data on a regular basis showing the crowding levels on all bus routes. It therefore recommended that TfL should address these gaps by determining a measure of crowding for buses and publishing findings against this measure regularly for all bus routes.

The Transport Committee is now seeking a response to its report and recommendations from the Mayor and TfL which will hopefully include a commitment from TfL to determine a measure of bus crowding and report on the crowding levels for all bus routes regularly. This should hopefully address the points you have raised.

In the meantime, if you wish to pursue this further, especially if you want to find out about recorded levels of customer dissatisfaction with bus route 122 or any other individual routes, I would suggest contacting TfL directly. It is TfL, and not the Transport Committee, which holds the data on the performance of all bus routes in the capital and should be able to respond with more information to assist you. Contact details for TfL can be found online via: http://www.tfl.gov.uk

Regards