data . willkara
dataset · MTA via NYS Open Data

MTA Subway Origin-Destination

The MTA's algorithmic reconstruction of where 4 million daily subway riders actually go. Turnstiles only capture entries — the agency probabilistically infers exits by analyzing time, location, and frequency of riders' subsequent entries. The resulting O-D matrix is the cleanest view of NYC's circulatory system that exists.

data through 2026-01-20 · 121,209,974 O-D pairs

station complexes · sorted by outbound volume

Top origin stations by estimated daily ridership

  1. Complex 611 11.1M
  2. Complex 610 8.3M
  3. Complex 607 6.0M
  4. Complex 602 5.6M
  5. Complex 628 4.7M
  6. Complex 164 4.6M
  7. Complex 318 4.1M
  8. Complex 614 4.0M
  9. Complex 447 3.4M
  10. Complex 616 3.4M
  11. Complex 624 3.2M
  12. Complex 225 3.1M
  13. Complex 612 3.0M
  14. Complex 609 3.0M
  15. Complex 623 2.8M

The Subway Tide story uses this dataset's hour-of-day breakdown to animate AM-peak vs PM-peak flows over a deck.gl arc layer. Station-complex IDs are in MTA's GTFS station registry; we keep the lookup as a static JSON in static/nyc/.

Stories using this data

scrolly

The subway tide

Four million weekday riders. The MTA used to know where they boarded but not where they got off — turnstiles only read entries. Then they built an algorithm. The cleanest public view of NYC's transit circulatory system that has ever existed.