Open NYC transit data

The data behind transitlab.nyc, free to download and query. Subway run times and slow zones, bus speeds and bus lanes, taxi and Uber/Lyft trips, and our archive of the MTA's live feeds, as Parquet files and one DuckDB database.

Everything on transitlab.nyc is built from public data, and we publish what we build. You can query it from your laptop with no account and no key.

Start in one line

With DuckDB 1.1 or newer:

ATTACH 'https://data.transitlab.nyc/v1/transitlab.duckdb' AS transitlab (READ_ONLY);

-- The ten costliest subway slow zones since 2022
SELECT segment, routes, start_date, end_date, rider_hours_lost
FROM transitlab.subway_slow_zones
WHERE kind = 'slow zone'
ORDER BY rider_hours_lost DESC
LIMIT 10;

DuckDB fetches only the parts of each file a query needs, so this runs in seconds even though the database points at gigabytes of trips. Rather not install anything? Use the SQL console in your browser.

What we publish

Subway segment timesDaily run time between every pair of stations in a row, since April 2021.Subway slow zonesEvery stretch where trains ran well over their usual time, and what it cost riders.Bus speedsOur speeds by route, direction and hour, from every bus's position.Bus delay and bus lanesTime buses lose on each stretch of street, and whether it has a bus lane.Live feed archiveEvery subway departure, bus position, bus prediction, alert and elevator outage, from October 2026.Taxi and app tripsEvery yellow, green and Uber/Lyft trip since 2023, with zone names added.

See all datasets for sizes and columns.

Three ways in

Parquet files at https://data.transitlab.nyc/v1/. Small tables are one file (v1/<table>.parquet); large ones are one file a month or a day (v1/<table>/year=YYYY/month=MM/…). v1/catalog.json lists every table with its rows, size, source, license and columns.
One DuckDB database at v1/transitlab.duckdb that knows every file, so FROM transitlab.<table> just works. See DuckDB, Python, R and JavaScript.
JSON feeds that the site itself draws from, small enough for a web page: JSON feeds.

Using it

Our data is free to use under CC BY 4.0: credit transitlab.nyc and the original source. The methods explain how each number is made and where it can mislead. The examples walk through four questions start to finish.