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MTA Subway Time® Historical Data

This page explains how to retrieve archival GTFS data from MTA New York City Transit's feed of real-time train arrival estimates on the 1 subway2 subway3 subway4 subway5 subway6 subwayL subway subway lines, the S subway 42nd Street Shuttle, and the Staten Island Railway. This archive began on September 17, 2014, and it continues daily to the present.

There are no links to files directly from this site. You will need to know the name of the file to fetch it. The files are hosted at amazonaws.com.

Files Generated Each Day

There are three separate transit line files

  • gtfs  This covers the 1 subway2 subway3 subway4 subway5 subway6 subwayS subway
  • gtfs-l  This covers the L subway
  • gtfs-si  This covers the Staten Island Railway (SIR)

How to Retrieve the Data Files

There are two ways to retrieve history data.

  1. The first way is through a daily 'roll up' of the many individual files.

    The 3 files mentioned above are collected 12 times an hour, or 864 files per day.

    There is a single archive file created at 12:01 a.m. every morning that consists of the previous day's files.

    The naming convention for the 'roll-up' archive URL is datamine-YEAR-MONTH-DAY.s3.amazonaws.com/gtfs.tgz

    Thus, for example the roll-up for 9/17/2014 can be downloaded from this URL:

    https://datamine-2014-09-17.s3.amazonaws.com/gtfs.tgz

  2. Another way to get the same data is to download each individual file from this datamine-history.s3.amazonaws.com URL.

    The naming convention for files on this site is the file name (above) + a suffix:

    YEAR-MONTH-DAY-HOUR-MINUTE

    There is one file for each transit line archived every five minutes, starting at one minute past the hour.

    The files are time stamped at 01, 06, 11, 16, 21, 26, 31, 36, 41, 46, 51, and 56 minutes after the hour.

    Thus, an example of a file name created on 9/17/2014 at around 9:30AM can be downloaded from this site as:

    https://datamine-history.s3.amazonaws.com/gtfs-2014-09-17-09-31

    Because the file is renamed at the intervals above, there is no file stamped 9:30 a.m., but there is one at 9:31AM.

For Further Information

All data is formatted in GTFS-realtime. For further infromation about the nature of information in specific fields, and the formatting and structure of the data, visit https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs-realtime/

This information is brought to you by: MTA HQ Information Services

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