New York City Subway

The master relation for all the subway lines in New York City 2621040 2621040. This includes all of the subway lines, stations and station accessibility (ADA access) as of 2020-07-06, excluding cases where stations are shut down due to circumstances like flooding.

Helpful tools

• Maps.me Subway Validator to find errors in routes and stations
• Busy Hours, an editor for public transport opening_hours=* and interval=*

Services

The official maps primarily show midday service. During rush hours, some routes may be extended to different termini or skip certain stations. Likewise, during evenings, weekends and late nights, some routes may be truncated or express trains may be shifted to local tracks, stopping at every station. These are treated as variants of midday service.

The MTA defines the following time periods for the purposes of scheduling. This gives an approximation of the opening_hours=* for each route variant, though the official timetables may differ considerably and should be checked individually:

• Late nights: opening_hours=Mo-Su 00:00-06:30
• Weekdays
  • Morning rush: opening_hours=Mo-Fr 06:30-09:30
  • Middays: opening_hours=Mo-Fr 09:30-15:30
  • Afternoon rush: opening_hours=Mo-Fr 15:30-20:00
  • Evenings: opening_hours=Mo-Fr 20:00-24:00
• Weekends: opening_hours=Sa-Su 06:30-24:00

Lines

The New York City Subway is unique among rapid transit networks of the world in having an extensive network of three- and four-track mainlines, in some cases parallel to each other serving the same neighborhoods. In North American parlance, 'local' refers to trains that stop at every station along the way, as well as the underlying track with platform access at each station (BrE 'slow'). Likewise, 'express' refers to the tracks that bypass select stations, and the trains they support (BrE 'fast'). For most of the New York City Subway's trackage, the outermost two tracks are local, and any express tracks lie between them. Some segments however, have express beneath local, northbound beneath southbound, express outside of local, or a number of other configurations.

Rather than being named by color, as is common with other North American transit systems, services are always referred to by their number or letter designation. Despite this, services are assigned widely recognizable colors used across all signage, indicating the line they travel on through Midtown and Downtown Manhattan (or other mainline if the service runs entirely outside Manhattan). With the New York City Subway, 'line' typically refers to the underlying infrastructure rather than the trains that run on it.

Yards

The New York City Subway has many yards for train storage and maintenance. These are tagged as railway=service_station, rather than railway=yard, which instead represents freight yards.