Request for historical elevator/escalator outage data (MIT class project)

[Mariana Vega]

Hi all,

I am part of a team of MIT Sloan students working on a class project analyzing MBTA elevator and escalator reliability, with the goal of predicting outages to support maintenance planning and improve accessibility for riders. We'd love to use real MBTA data rather than reconstruct it ourselves, and we're hoping someone here can point us in the right direction.

Specifically, we're looking for:

1. Historical elevator/escalator outage/alert data — past instances of ELEVATOR_CLOSURE/ESCALATOR_CLOSURE alerts (start time, end time, station, unit ID, and if available, cause). We can pull current status from the V3 API's /alerts and /live_facilities endpoints, but as far as we can tell those only reflect live state, not history.
2. We noticed the prediction_loc tool references an S3 archive of real-time feeds, including alerts. If that archive (or something similar) exists and could be shared, even a subset covering the past year or two, that would be extremely helpful.
3. If no archive exists, would it be possible to get a data export from another internal system (e.g., a maintenance/CMMS log) covering elevator/escalator downtime? We understand if that data can't be shared for privacy or operational reasons — just want to ask.

This is for an academic project only; we don't plan to redistribute the raw data and are happy to adhere to data usage standards or to credit the MBTA appropriately in our writeup. We're also glad to share our findings back with the team if useful.

Thanks so much for your time, and for maintaining such an accessible API — it's made this project possible even before this ask!

Thank you,

Mariana Vega

MBA Candidate at MIT Sloan

[Developer at MBTA]

Hi Mariana,

Thanks for reaching out and looking to make MBTA-related data part of your project!

While the PredictionLoc tool mentions an internal archive that is largely deprecated at this time, we do have a number of datasets publicly available via our Lamp platform: performancedata.mbta.com.

One of the files listed on that page, `LAMP_RT_ALERTS`, is a long-term archive of our alerts data, including, but not limited to, elevator and escalator closures. The corresponding data dictionary can be found here. The archive is a Parquet file, for which various tools exist online to convert into a form that can be more easily viewed and analyzed.

Please feel free to reach out, either via deve...@mbta.com or in this forum if you have any questions about the archive's format and/or the interpretation of the alerts data!

Thank you,
Developer@mbta