Subway departures

One row each time a train leaves a station, recorded live from the MTA's subway feeds since October 2026.

Rows: 398,192
Size: 7.5 MB
Covers: 2026-10-04 onward
Updated: Daily
Source: MTA subway GTFS-realtime feeds
License: CC BY 4.0

Fileshttps://data.transitlab.nyc/v1/subway_stop_events/year=YYYY/month=MM/YYYY-MM-DD.parquetOne file a day, 2 so far. In the database as transitlab.subway_stop_events.

Rows and size from catalog.json, 2026-10-06.

What a row is

One train leaving one station. Every 10 seconds our collector reads the MTA’s eight subway feeds. Each feed lists, for every train, the stops it has yet to make. When a stop drops off a train’s list, the train has just left it, and we write a row with departed_at set to the feed time of that snapshot.

When a whole trip vanishes from the feed, its remaining stops get rows with event = 'trip_ended' and departed_at set to when the trip was last seen. Leave those out of run-time work.

This is the source of subway segment times from October 2026 on.

Query it

-- How long did southbound L trains take from Union Sq to 3 Av yesterday?
WITH dep AS (
  SELECT trip_uid, stop_id, max(departed_at) AS departed_at   -- the last departure is the real one
  FROM transitlab.subway_stop_events
  WHERE event = 'departed' AND route_id = 'L'
    AND stop_id IN ('L03S', 'L05S')
    AND departed_at >= current_date - 1 AND departed_at < current_date
  GROUP BY trip_uid, stop_id
)
SELECT a.trip_uid,
       a.departed_at AT TIME ZONE 'UTC' AT TIME ZONE 'America/New_York' AS left_union_sq,
       date_diff('second', a.departed_at, b.departed_at) AS seconds
FROM dep a JOIN dep b USING (trip_uid)
WHERE a.stop_id = 'L03S' AND b.stop_id = 'L05S'
ORDER BY left_union_sq;

Columns

row_idvarchar

Stable ID of the row. If a row appears twice, keep one.

observed_attimestamp

When we wrote the row (UTC).

eventvarchar

departed, or trip_ended when a whole trip dropped out of the feed.

feedvarchar

Which of the MTA's subway feeds the train came from.

trip_uidvarchar

Our ID for the train trip.

trip_idvarchar

MTA trip ID.

route_idvarchar

Subway route.

start_datevarchar

Service date, YYYYMMDD.

stop_idvarchar

GTFS stop ID, with direction.

arrivaltimestamp

The MTA's last predicted arrival (UTC).

departuretimestamp

The MTA's last predicted departure (UTC).

first_seentimestamp

First time the stop appeared in the feed (UTC).

last_seentimestamp

Last time it appeared (UTC).

departed_attimestamp

Feed time of the first snapshot without the stop: just after the train left (UTC).

Good to know

Use the last departure per trip and stop. The feed sometimes drops a stop and adds it back, so about 3% of trip-stops have more than one departed row. The last one is right; the first can be minutes early.
Times are UTC without a zone. Write departed_at AT TIME ZONE 'UTC' to get a proper timestamp before you turn it into New York time.
Times are within about 10 to 15 seconds. That is how often the feed refreshes. Averages over many trains are sharper than that.
How we checked it against the older archive: Our subway collector.