About Commuter Lines

Commuter Lines answers one question well: what does it take to get from this station to that one, and what does it cost.

Who makes it

Commuter Lines is built and edited by one independent publisher, with no staff from and no connection to any operator. The schedules and fares are not written by hand: they are computed by a pipeline that reads the operators' published feeds and charts and renders a page for each station and each pair of stations with direct service. What is written by hand are the notes about each line, the fare rules for each network and the guides, and those are written once and shown on every page they apply to, so a change in the rules is a change in one place.

How a page is made

The four schedule feeds are downloaded weekly and the LIRR, Metro-North, NJ Transit and PATH timetables are read into one set of stations, stop sequences and station pairs.
For each pair with direct service, one representative weekday, Saturday and Sunday are picked, chosen as the date the most trains run, and the trains, first and last departure, fastest and slowest run, express count and peak and midday gaps are counted on those days.
Fares are read from the operators' published charts and, for NJ Transit, from the fare tables printed in each line timetable, and matched to the pair.
Every page is checked against sanity ranges before it is written. A page that fails is not published and the build stops until the cause is found.
Pages are released to search engines in stages, a few hundred at a time, so that each batch can be checked before the next.

How the numbers are checked

Three checks run on every build. The first is a set of ranges: trains a day, travel time, fare and distance must all fall inside what is physically possible on that network, and a station must have at least one destination. The second tests fares parsed from a PDF against the operator's own price ratios, because a column shifted by one place produces numbers that are all real and all wrong; a row that fails is dropped, not realigned. The third checks the built site: every link resolves, every page has one heading, and nothing unreleased is reachable.

When sources disagree, the operator's own dataset wins. A third-party site once listed a Metro-North station in the wrong fare zone at a fare that was never charged; the official dataset had it right. When a fare is missing, the page shows no fare rather than a guessed one.

The operators publish that information, but spread across timetable PDFs, fare charts and trip planners that each cover one network. If your journey crosses two of them, or you just want to know the fare before you commit, it takes several lookups. This site does those lookups once and publishes the answer as a page.

What is here

414 stations across LIRR, Metro-North, NJ Transit rail and PATH
Every pair of stations with direct service, with trip time, stop count and fare
First and last train, weekday and weekend service counts, typical gap between trains
Fare zone and accessibility status for each station

What is not here

Real-time running information. Use the operator's app for delays and track numbers.
Ticket sales. Buy from the operator.
Bus, subway and light rail. Commuter rail only, for now.

How often it changes

The feeds are refreshed every week and the whole site is rebuilt from them, so the "Updated" date on a page is the date of the schedule data it was built from, not the date someone last looked at it. Fare charts are reloaded when an operator publishes a revision, and the effective date of the chart in use is printed on every trip page.

Independence

Commuter Lines is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, NJ Transit, or the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. All schedule and fare data comes from those agencies' own published feeds and documents, listed in full on the data sources page.

Timetables change and fares are revised. Always confirm with the operator before you travel.

Questions or a correction: get in touch.