Working with NYC MTA Real-Time Subway Data

The API Responses are based on the GTFS Realtime specification, which is based on Protocol Buffers, or “Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data”.

If you're working with the subway data on the web, you may want to easily convert it to JSON. I use the gtfs-realtime-bindings npm module. This may or may not be an efficient or smart thing to do, but you probably want to get straight to exploring the real-time data and not a mechanism for serializing structured data.

Converted to JSON, it looks like this:

      {
        "header": {
          "gtfsRealtimeVersion": "1.0",
          "timestamp": "1599073154"
        },
        "entity": [
      
          {
            "id": "000001A",
            "tripUpdate": {
              "trip": {
                "tripId": "081600_A..N",
                "startTime": "13:36:00",
                "startDate": "20200902",
                "routeId": "A"
              },
              "stopTimeUpdate": [
      
                {
                  "arrival": { "time": "1599074067" },
                  "departure": { "time": "1599074067" },
                  "stopId": "A03N"
                },
                
                {
                  "arrival": { "time": "1599074262" },
                  "departure": { "time": "1599074262" },
                  "stopId": "A02N"
                }
      
              ]
            }
          },
      
          {
            "id": "000002A",
            "vehicle": {
              "trip": {
                "tripId": "081600_A..N",
                "startTime": "13:36:00",
                "startDate": "20200902",
                "routeId": "A"
              },
              "currentStopSequence": 35,
              "stopId": "A05"
            }
          }
      
        ]
      }