Transit MCP

Transit MCP

Transit MCP is a free, anonymous, read-only Model Context Protocol server that lets your AI answer transit questions: how do I get there, when's the next train, is anything broken, where's my bus. It's a side project, and general-purpose agents (ChatGPT, Claude, Muse, Instinct and friends) plug straight into it.

It covers:

• New York: the subway, the Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North and NYC buses.
• Washington DC: Metrorail and Metrobus.
• SF Bay Area: every operator in 511 SF Bay's regional feed, including BART, Muni, Caltrain, AC Transit, VTA, SamTrans and the ferries. Departures, alerts and vehicles work there, and so does trip planning.

Metro MCP is now Transit MCP.

Nearly 100,000 requests served in the last 7 days.

Connect

The production endpoint is https://transitmcp.com/mcp. No login is required. No client credentials, bearer token, or OAuth flow is required; Transit MCP does not collect client credentials. Stale Authorization headers are ignored.

The previous endpoint, https://metro-mcp.anuragd.me/mcp, will continue to be supported and serves the same Worker.

Directories

• OpenAI (ChatGPT/Codex)
• Claude Directory
• Official MCP Registry (com.transitmcp/transit-mcp)
• Smithery

Claude

claude mcp add --transport http transit-mcp https://transitmcp.com/mcp

Codex

codex mcp add transit-mcp https://transitmcp.com/mcp

Generic Streamable HTTP client

{

"mcpServers": { "transit-mcp": { "type": "http", "url": "https://transitmcp.com/mcp" } } }

Agent skill

skills/transit-mcp/SKILL.md teaches an agent which tool answers which question, how to handle a name that means several places, and how to keep a rider posted by rechecking a planned trip before they leave. Install it with your agent's skills tool (for example npx skills add Aarekaz/transit-mcp) or copy the file into its skills folder.

POST /mcp is the recommended stateless Streamable HTTP endpoint. POST and OPTIONS /sse are a compatibility alias; legacy GET SSE, DELETE, session-message URLs, and slash variants return 405.

What it provides

This checkout registers 18 MCP tools: the 13 compatible DC/NYC tools plus five global capabilities, find_transit, plan_trip, get_departures, get_service_status, and get_vehicle_status. The compatible tools call WMATA and MTA directly for arrivals, service incidents, stations, routes, buses, trains, transfers, and vehicle positions.

All three regions serve the five global tools. Here's what they do:

• plan_trip plans trips between stations, or from map coordinates with short walks, using the published timetables and live predictions. In New York and DC it searches the rail network on its own. Anywhere, including the SF Bay Area and buses, you can name the lines to ride in routes (up to four) and it finds the real trips, stops, transfers and walks on them. When it can't search on its own it says why and returns routeHints: the lines near each end and the ones that serve both. Every itinerary is checked by an independent validator and comes with plain steps a rider can follow.
• Place names go in as the rider says them. A name for one place (Penn Station, SFO, two stations across the street) covers all its stations. A name for different places ("Broadway") gets the best trip from each in plan_trip, labelled in reading and explained in notice, and a question to ask in the other tools. No tool shows the user a form.
• get_departures with toStop answers "next train from A to B": only trips that go on to that stop, each with its arrival time there.
• get_departures merges the timetable with live trip updates. In NYC that includes rerouted trains and trains missing from the timetable, which are marked as observed rather than dropped. You can pass a station name directly; a station complex such as Times Sq-42 St or 14 St-Union Sq counts as one place and lists departures from every line in it, and genuinely different stations with the same name come back as choices.
• get_service_status returns the agencies' own alerts for a city, line, station, or trip, plus elevator and escalator outages there: whether each is on the step-free path, whether a backup elevator exists, and MTA's suggested way around.
• plan_trip with accessibility: "step_free" plans journeys that only board, alight and change where the platform is reachable without stairs, and avoids stations cut off by a current elevator outage. Station access comes from WMATA's GTFS and MTA's station list (including stations accessible in one direction only); if the live elevator report is missing or stale, it says so instead of guessing.
• find_transit resolves stations, stops, routes and train IDs. Stations rank ahead of street stops and rail ahead of bus, each candidate says what it is (station, platform or street stop, modes, lines), and a few reviewed place names work, such as SFO, Union Square, Penn Station, Grand Central and Dulles.
• Names work the way people type them: "King Street" finds King St-Old Town, "42nd Street Times Square" finds Times Sq-42 St, and misspellings like "Crystl Cty" still land. DC stations also answer to WMATA's published names ("Chinatown", "Convention Center", "Adams Morgan"). Without a region, a name is searched in every region; find_transit with no arguments lists the regions and what each supports. When nothing matches, you get suggestions, the closest names, which are never treated as a match.
• Live data is on the first question, not just the second: a quiet coordinator answers a stop's departures from the agency's feed as soon as it arrives. Times a rider sees are in the agency's local time with its offset (18:32-04:00).
• get_vehicle_status shows where trains and buses are: on a line, on a dated trip from a departure board or planned journey, or at a station (every station of a complex). Each train reports its train ID (MTA's, such as 1A 1023 207/FAR, or WMATA's number), the station it is stopped at or heading to, the station it last served, and its destination. DC trains carry GPS coordinates. MTA publishes stations rather than coordinates, so an NYC train stopped at a station is placed there and one between stations has no coordinates rather than a guessed one.

The NYC coverage also carries the Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North and NYC buses, and DC carries Metrobus. Journeys use every mode, buses included, and change between them on foot at stations such as Penn Station, Grand Central and Atlantic Terminal; LIRR and Metro-North departures show the track. The network planner searches compact timetables a cron builds in R2, then plans and validates the proposed lines exactly (see src/transit/planner/network-plan.ts). NYC bus predictions, locations and alerts come from MTA Bus Time; a self-hosted Worker without its key (MTA_BUS_API_KEY) serves NYC buses from the timetable only.

Timetables are rebuilt at the edge when WMATA or MTA publish tables that actually changed. For the NYC subway, which MTA republishes about hourly, a change to yesterday, today or tomorrow is built once the published timetable is three hours old, and changes further out wait up to six hours. Live trains the timetable doesn't have yet still show up, from the realtime feed. 511 SF Bay timetables are stored automatically and built offline. An update that would remove most of a day's service is rejected, and one that makes live matching worse is rolled back. Under the hood on the docs page has the longer story, with diagrams. DC and NYC global transit is the verification record. SF Bay data comes from 511 SF Bay and participating operators, with their attribution on every result.

Honest limits

• Late at night, when nothing runs within walking distance, plan_trip finds nothing and hands back routeHints instead.
• NYC trains between stations have no coordinates; MTA reports stations, not GPS.
• The first call after a quiet spell can take several seconds while the timetable loads.
• The 13 original tools are still here and unchanged for older clients.

It also provides four transit:// URI templates (stations, routes, incidents, and versioned entities) and three canned prompts (service-briefing, commute-planner, and accessibility-check). Use plan_trip for journeys; do not assemble routes from departure boards. Global results distinguish realtime, scheduled_only, and unavailable, with source timestamps, versions, reasons, attribution, and a JSON text fallback.

An Apps-capable host can render the Transit Board resource for the 13 DC and NYC tools. See the Apps verification record.

Runtime and safety boundaries

• Protocol: MCP 2026-07-28 stateless Streamable HTTP. The server does not advertise sessions, resumability, or server push.
• Request trust: public origin and host/origin allowlists are validated at startup. The signed MRTR request-state codec is bound to the MCP method and expires after five minutes.
• Cancellation: client disconnects propagate request cancellation to MCP handlers and upstream transit fetches.
• Caching: discovery and tool metadata are publicly cacheable for 24 hours. Station and route resources are public-cacheable; incident and versioned-entity resources are not. Legacy WMATA and MTA tools retain their provider caches. Global tools read versioned artifacts and snapshots without fetching upstream providers during a request.
• Rate limiting: roughly 300 requests per 60-second window per source-IP key per Cloudflare location. Shared egress IPs group clients, and enforcement is eventually consistent. This is abuse protection, not a dedicated user quota.
• Rollback: the inactive MetroMcpAgent class and original v1 Durable Object migration remain for rollback. Do not add a deletion migration during stabilization.

Deploy your own

Client access is anonymous. A self-hosted Worker still needs its own WMATA and 511 SF Bay API keys plus a stable MCP_REQUEST_STATE_KEY of at least 32 bytes for signed MRTR state.

bun install --frozen-lockfile

cp .dev.vars.example .dev.vars bun run dev

Use the checked-in loopback origin, hostname allowlists, and ENVIRONMENT=development values together. Keep .dev.vars out of source control. Production and preview use their own origins, allowlists, state keys, WMATA and 511 keys, artifact buckets, and MCP_RATE_LIMITER bindings.

Before an approved deployment, run only dry-runs:

production_out=$(mktemp -d /tmp/transit-mcp-production.XXXXXX)

preview_out=$(mktemp -d /tmp/transit-mcp-preview.XXXXXX) node node_modules/wrangler/bin/wrangler.js deploy --dry-run --env "" --outdir "$production_out" node node_modules/wrangler/bin/wrangler.js deploy --env preview --dry-run --outdir "$preview_out"

Verification

Run bun run build && bun run test && bun run test:apps. The conformance runner starts and stops its own isolated local Worker, uses the installed pinned referee, and gates a frozen product profile with mapped real tests. The full official score is reported separately and is not a product-profile pass:

./scripts/run-conformance.sh