[MTA] Upcoming Stations Affected metadata in GTFS Realtime Service Alerts (May 4)

[Shen-Cruz, Dillon]

Hi MTA developer community,

Starting May 4, we will begin publishing Stations Affected metadata in our GTFS Realtime Service Alerts feed for subways. This new field identifies specific stations impacted by planned work, allowing developers to more precisely determine where a service alert applies instead of inferring impact from text descriptions. This should help improve alert filtering, trip planning, station-specific notifications, and other rider-facing digital experiences. Please note that the MTA is not yet populating this metadata for real-time delays, disruptions, and other unplanned service changes.

Documentation is available on GitHub: https://github.com/nymta/gtfs-documentation/blob/main/feeds/subway/gtfs-rt/stations_affected.md. This change is intended to be non-breaking, but we recommend reviewing the documentation to confirm that your system will handle the additional data appropriately.

As an aside, we’ve also begun publishing GTFS documentation in a new public GitHub repository: nymta/gtfs-documentation. We’ll use this repository for future GTFS documentation updates going forward.

As always, we appreciate your partnership as we continue improving our public-facing data and APIs. Please reach out if you have questions or feedback.

Thanks,

MTA

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[Dillon Shen-Cruz]

Hi folks, just sending a reminder that we are enabling Stations Affected metadata the morning of May 4 (Monday). Please be sure to review the documentation to ensure this is not a breaking change for your systems. Thanks all, and have a great weekend.

[Dillon Shen-Cruz]

Stations Affected metadata is currently live in our Service Alerts feed for subways, as of 11am this morning. Please let me know if you have any issues or questions while ingesting this data. Thanks all!