The New York City subway is lauded for being extensive, relatively cheap, and the city’s nervous system, but you’d be hard pressed to find someone alleging it’s reliable. Occasional natives, transplants, and tourists alike will blindly and aggressively put their faith in the like of the MTA’s PDF subway schedules, Google Maps, or Citimapper, despite continued inconsistency and unreliability from all three. Even arrival clocks, due to the insanely vintage and steampunk way trains are tracked as they travel, are not always accurate. These, though, are your best bet for knowing when a train is coming – and now they’ve got their own app.
In addition to the MTA’s online Subway Times, which offers the current arrival times by line and station and is accessible from the internet even beyond the subway’s hallowed platforms, Underway NYC now offers the same information but in app form and plotted to a subway map. The app, which is only available for iOS devices (with no future plans for Android expansion at this time, unfortunately), is free. Notably, while most of the lines have MTA arrival data, the majority of that is “beta” data which should be taken with an extra large pinch of salt.
For those of you looking to acquire not just the arrival time information but the counter itself, see here.