mta-mcp

When to use something else

If your question is "is the L running right now," use mta.info or any transit app. They're free and official, and they show what's happening now.

This server is for planning ahead: a future date, a specific station, and an answer you can put in the email to everyone coming. For live arrivals inside an AI assistant, try one of the other NYC subway servers further down.

Each example below is labeled. Verified 2026-09-21 means we ran that call live that day. Saved feed means we ran it against copies of MTA's feeds saved in the repo, dated on the panel. Illustrative shows a call Claude might make, not one we ran.

When an alert means more trains

An alert can mention your station because service there got better.

Counting any mention as a disruption would flag 68 St here, because the alert that names it adds service. This server reads MTA's alert_type to tell the two apart.

Which station did you mean?

Elevators and the way around

get_accessibility_outages({
  "stop_id": "414",
  "route_id": "4",
  "date": "2026-09-26"
})

{
  "date": "2026-09-26",
  "query": "161 St-Yankee Stadium",
  "stop_id": "414",
  "route_id": "4",
  "station_accessibility": { "status": "fully_accessible", "mta_notes": null },
  "outage_count": 5,
  "date_caveats": [],
  "outages": [
    …four more elevators…
    {
      "station": "161 St-Yankee Stadium",
      "trainno": "B/D/4",
      "equipment": "EL133",
      "equipmenttype": "EL",
      "serving": "mezzanine to Manhattan-bound 4 platform",
      "ADA": "Y",
      "outagedate": "11/06/2024 09:00:00 AM",
      "estimatedreturntoservice": "09/30/2026 11:59:00 PM",
      "reason": "Capital Replacement",
      "matched_by": "name",
      "match_note": "MTA's equipment inventory places EL133 at 161 St-Yankee Stadium (D11), another station in this complex. The outage feed's station name fits this station too, so it is listed here.",
      "inventory": {
        "stop_ids": ["D11"],
        "ada_compliant": "YES",
        "redundant_elevator": "-",
        "alternative_route": "To access street level: Take a Manhattan-bound
          4 to 125 St. Use elevators to transfer to a Bronx-bound 6. Exit at
          Hunts Point Av and transfer to a Washington Heights-bound Bx6-SBS
          bus to E 161 St and River Av. …"
      }
    }
  ]
}

How to use it

Once it's installed, you ask Claude a question in plain English, and Claude picks a tool and fills in the arguments. It works best when the question names a train, a station, and a date.

Try asking

Illustrative Claude chooses the tool, so its call may differ a little from the one shown.

Worked example: a travel note for an event

check_route_on_date({
  "route_id": "6",
  "date": "2026-09-19",
  "stop_id": "628",
  "include_accessibility": true
})

{
  "route_id": "6",
  "date": "2026-09-19",
  "disrupted": false,
  "station": {
    "stop_id": "628",
    "stop_name": "68 St-Hunter College",
    "routes": ["4", "6", "6X"],
    "accessibility": { "status": "fully_accessible", "mta_notes": null }
  },
  "station_level_detail": true,
  "alert_count": 1,
  "alerts": [{
    "alert_type": "Planned - Part Suspended",
    "effect": "reduced",
    "header_text": "No [6] between Hunts Point Av and 125 St",
    "human_readable_active_period": "Sep 18 - Oct 19, Fri 9:30 PM to Mon 5:00 AM",
    "affected_stops": [
      { "stop_id": "614", "stop_name": "Longwood Av" },
      …five more Bronx stations…
    ],
    "affects_this_station": false,
    "relevant_to_station": false
  }],
  "accessibility_outages": {
    "outage_count": 0,
    "outages": [],
    "note": "… No outage is listed here. A missing outage is not proof
      the station is usable: the feed can lag, and an outage MTA hasn't
      entered won't show. Confirm at
      https://www.mta.info/elevator-escalator-status before travel."
  },
  "disclaimer": "Unofficial. BetaNYC is not the MTA …"
}

Every parameter and every field in every answer is in the tool reference. The elevator, escalator, and ADA data, and where it falls short, are in docs/accessibility.md.

Running it

1. Clone and build

You need Node 18 or newer, and no API key.

git clone https://github.com/BetaNYC/mta-mcp.git
cd mta-mcp
npm install    # also builds

2. Point your AI app at the build

For Claude Code, in a project's .mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mta-mcp": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["${HOME}/Code/mta-mcp/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

For Claude Desktop, in claude_desktop_config.json. Claude Desktop doesn't expand ${HOME}, so use the full path to your copy:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mta-mcp": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/mta-mcp/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

3. Ask a question

Restart the app and ask something from Try asking, like "Check the 6 train and the elevators at 68 St–Hunter College for October 3."

Using Claude Code and want to use fewer tokens per conversation? The same tools also come as a skill, with no MCP server to run. See skills/README.md.

What it can't do yet

What we haven't settled

• We've only inspected the subway alerts feed. Bus, Long Island Rail Road, and Metro-North alerts are untested. MTA's docs say all four feeds append a status rank to every alert id, and we found one on 1 of 150 subway entities. We don't know if that's a partial rollout or a documentation error, so we use a different field.
• The effect classification covers the 11 alert_type values we saw in a live pull on 2026-09-16. MTA can send others. An unrecognized value counts as a disruption until someone adds it to the map.
• MTA publishes no rate limit or refresh cadence. We cache answers for 60 seconds and wait at least a second between requests, which is a cautious guess. The server never polls in the background, and the test suite never calls MTA.
• We've tested it against a handful of real dates and stations.

Want bus or LIRR alerts, or found something wrong? Open an issue.

Other NYC subway MCP servers

For most subway questions, one of these is a better fit. Several are further along than ours, and all of them do live arrivals.

Use this one when your question has a date in it. It checks a future day at one station, and it tells service that got worse there from service that got better.

Why you have to build it yourself

Our other seven MCP servers install from npm. This one runs from a local build because of MTA's data feed terms, which say users of an app have to get MTA's data from a non-MTA server. A published package would have every user's machine fetch straight from api-endpoint.mta.info, with no server of ours in between. MTA's wording and our reasoning are in docs/terms-compliance.md.

Community

Build with us

BetaNYC builds and maintains this project. We're New York's civic technology and open data community, and we work to improve lives in New York through civic design, technology, and data. Our members, BetaBuilders, talk through tools like this one on the BetaNYC Discord while they're still rough.

Attending a class or registering for a flagship event earns 90 days of access at no cost. Giving $5 a month gets you in too, and funds School of Data, Mapping for Equity, Open Data Week, CityCamp NYC, and the weekly newsletter. If cost is the obstacle, say so. Learn more about BetaBuilders.

The newsletter, public events, classes, and this server don't require a membership. More about us: who we are, our work, the events calendar, NYC School of Data, CityCamp NYC, and github.com/BetaNYC, where our seven npm-published MCP servers live. If these tools are useful to you, please donate.

Credits

Data from the MTA service alerts feed, free to use under MTA's terms. Station names from MTA's published static GTFS. MTA's own implementation notes are at nymta/gtfs-documentation.

We wrote most of this server and this page with Claude. Panels labeled Verified or Saved feed show real calls. The panel labeled Illustrative does not.