🚇 MBTA Live Transit Scraper

🚀 Export Boston's live transit feed in seconds. Routes, stops, real-time vehicle positions, next-arrival predictions, and service alerts across the entire MBTA network. No sign-up, no manual GTFS wrangling.

The MBTA Live Transit Scraper exports the official Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority live feed and returns up to 60 transit fields per record, depending on whether you fetch routes, stops, vehicles, predictions, or alerts. The MBTA feed is the canonical reference for Boston public transit and powers Google Maps, Transit App, the official MBTA app, and dozens of academic mobility studies.

The catalogue covers the Red, Orange, Blue, Green, and Mattapan rapid-transit lines, the Silver Line BRT, every commuter-rail line, hundreds of bus routes, and harbor ferry service across more than 8,000 stops. This Actor makes the live feed downloadable as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML in under a minute. Filtering by route, stop, transit mode, and direction runs server-side.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Boston transit-app developers, mobility researchers, urban-planning teams, real-estate platforms, journalism teams, GTFS data engineers	Real-time vehicle dashboards, arrival-prediction widgets, accessibility audits, alerts pipelines, transit-equity research, GTFS validation

📋 What the MBTA Live Transit Scraper does

Five data modes in a single Actor:

• 🛤️ Routes. All 200+ routes across heavy rail, light rail, commuter rail, bus, and ferry, with colors, headsigns, and route types.
• 🚉 Stops. 8,000+ stops including platform names, lat/lon, wheelchair-boarding flags, and physical address.
• 🚍 Vehicles. Live positions for every vehicle in revenue service, with bearing, speed, occupancy, and current stop.
• 🕒 Predictions. Next-arrival predictions per stop with arrival/departure times, headsign, schedule relationship, and uncertainty.
• ⚠️ Alerts. Active disruptions, planned closures, severity, cause, effect, and the affected route/stop entities.

Filter every mode by route IDs, stop IDs, transit mode (heavy rail, light rail, commuter rail, bus, ferry), and direction.

💡 Why it matters: MBTA serves more than 1 million weekday riders. Real-time transit data powers commuter apps, accessibility studies, and journalism on service equity. Building your own pipeline means parsing GTFS-Realtime protobufs, joining static GTFS, and handling alerts. This Actor skips all of that.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: activePeriod, address, affectedRoutes, affectedRouteTypes, affectedStops, arrivalTime, arrivalUncertainty, atStreet, bearing, bikesAllowed, blockId, cause, color, createdAt, currentStatus, currentStopSequence, departureTime, departureUncertainty, description, directionDestinations, directionId, directionNames, dropOffType, effect, facilityType, fareClass, header, headsign, id, informedEntities, label, lastTrip, latitude, lifecycle, listed, locationType, longitude, longName, municipality, name. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the MBTA Live Transit Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick a mode (routes, stops, vehicles, predictions, alerts), add filters as needed.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor pull the live feed.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded transit feed: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

🔗 Recommended Actors

• 🚦 TfL London Live Status Scraper - Live London transport status and disruptions
• 🗺️ OSRM Routing Scraper - Driving, cycling, and walking routes anywhere
• 🗺️ Nominatim OSM Scraper - Geocode addresses via OpenStreetMap
• ✈️ OurAirports Scraper - Global airport master data
• 🌍 Overpass OSM Scraper - Query arbitrary OpenStreetMap features

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more transit and geospatial scrapers.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority or any of its affiliates. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open transit data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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