Realtime arrivals at your favorite stops.
Get around underground with Tunnel Rat.
Navigate New York’s subway with realtime info and alerts.
Always free, no ads, zero tracking.
Made for New Yorkers.
Includes everything you need to get through your day, all for free.
Alerts & statuses across the system.
Interactive map for finding stops, entrances, and places.
Live directions to anywhere in the city.
Widgets for quick reference.
Notifications for alerts and trip reminders.
Search any line or stop across all 5 boroughs.
Built with purpose.
Tunnel Rat was designed with three principles in mind, from day one.
Reliable
Opens and updates in seconds, whether on the street or underground.
Even if you’re stuck in a tunnel, it falls back to scheduled train times, so you always have something to work with.
Accessible
Designed for everyone, with bold colors, clear language, and high-contrast options.
It supports most of the iOS accessibility features you might need—VoiceOver, Dynamic Type, and more.
Private
We never sell your data, and we never track you. Period.
Your favorites, searches, and location stay on your device—never on our servers.
Privacy PolicyQuestions, answered.
Quick hits on some of the bits people want to know about Tunnel Rat.
Nope! Tunnel Rat works the second you open it—no signup, no email, no password to forget.
We might change this in the future, particularly to make it easier to use Tunnel Rat across multiple devices, but we plan to keep it optional.
Yes, completely. Live arrivals, favorites, alerts, trip planning, widgets—all free. We may add a few optional, paid extras down the road, but everything you need to catch your train stays free.
It does less, on purpose. No ads, no clutter, no five taps to see your train. Just open it, glance, and go.
Mostly, yep. When you're between stops or in a tunnel, Tunnel Rat keeps showing your last live times, fills the gaps with scheduled estimates, and catches up the moment you're back online.
It can't magically get signal when there is none, but it's built to make sure you have what you need during those short moments between stops.
Today, Tunnel Rat is subway-only—every line and every station done well, rather than spread thin across every mode of transit. We may expand over time, but the subway will always come first.
Tunnel Rat is built by tktk studio—a one-person independent studio in Brooklyn, founded by designer Ryan Reid. It's made by a New Yorker, for New Yorkers who actually ride. Read more about the studio at tktk.studio.
No. Tunnel Rat is an independent app, not affiliated with or endorsed by the MTA. We use the MTA's official public data under license to show route symbols and station names, but we're our own thing.
No. Today, Tunnel Rat is only available for iOS. We don't have immediate plans to add Android or web support.
Both! Tunnel Rat takes the MTA's official alert and turns it into a short summary you can read at a glance. The original MTA wording is always one tap away, so you can check it if you're ever in doubt.
Live arrivals, service alerts, and station details all come straight from the MTA's official public data feeds, with a few extra details from New York's public open data. When you lose signal underground, Tunnel Rat falls back to the scheduled timetable and labels it clearly, so it's never a guess. The app is built on open-source libraries too—you'll find the full list of data sources and licenses on the About page.
Yes—the map is Apple Maps, built right into iOS. Everything on top of it—the lines, arrivals, and alerts—is the MTA's official data. Because the map comes from Apple, your use of it falls under Apple's privacy policy, the same as any app built on Apple Maps.