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digitalhen

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nyc-subway-realtime

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Before you dive in

Short version: this is free for research, journalism, teaching, and personal
projects. Please credit me, and please don't use it to make money without
asking first. That's really the whole thing.

The MTA's data is theirs, and it's public. GTFS-RT, static GTFS, and the
ridership figures all come from the MTA's open data. I'm not claiming any of
it, and you're very welcome to fetch it straight from the source — if today's
feed is all you need, you don't need this archive at all.

What I'm sharing is the history. The MTA keeps none: every poll overwrites
the last, so nothing upstream remembers what the network looked like at 08:14
last Tuesday. The continuous capture since April 2026, the decoding and
deduplication, the analytical panels, the learned baselines and the labelled
prediction record are my work, and that's what I'm licensing to you under
CC BY-NC 4.0.

What you can do

Use it, share it, adapt it, and publish whatever you find — just credit
Henry Williams / subway.fyi. Academic work, journalism, teaching, civic and
policy analysis, hobby projects: all welcome, and I'd genuinely like to hear
what you build with it.

The one real limit: not for commercial use

Please don't use this, or anything derived from it, to make money without
asking me first. That covers shipping it inside a paid product or service,
training a model that's then deployed or sold commercially (derived weights
carry the same limit), fee-paid consulting or analysis, and for-profit
internal use.

Access here isn't a commercial licence on its own — but do get in touch if you
want one. I'm open to it, and it's usually a short conversation.

Two caveats worth knowing

• No warranty. This is an independent capture pipeline, not
  infrastructure. It has gaps, and it isn't safety-certified — please don't
  rely on it anywhere that being wrong would actually matter.
• It isn't an MTA product. Unofficial and unaffiliated, so please don't
  present it as an MTA source.