About istambulmetro.com
An independent guide to the İstanbul Metro: who writes it, what data it rests on, and what we refuse to publish.
What this site is
istambulmetro.com is an independent guide to the İstanbul Metro. It has no connection to Metro İstanbul A.Ş., İBB or TCDD and does not speak for them. The rail network here is 11 metro lines and 158 stations, and what a passenger actually needs — which line, how much, what time — is scattered across several institutions’ pages. This site puts it in one place.
How the content is produced
Fares
Straight from Metro İstanbul's own Ücret Tarifeleri page, with the date we checked it. The current tariff took effect on 20 July 2026 (İBB Council decision of 17 July, a 10% rise).
Station figures
The passenger numbers on each station page come from the İBB Open Data Portal's station-by-station count; the 2025 data was updated on the portal on 3 February 2026. Across the 145 stations it counts, the network carried 628,528,204 passengers in 2025.
Lines, stations and interchanges
Metro İstanbul's line pages and the official network map. An interchange is modelled differently depending on whether it is one station or two linked by a walk — the route planner knows the difference.
Service hours
The operating hours Metro İstanbul publishes. There is no real-time data anywhere on this site: İBB's GTFS dataset has not been updated since 2024 and no live feed is public.
What we deliberately leave out
A figure a reader cannot check is worse than no figure, because there is no way to tell the two apart. So we leave out:
"Live" departure information
No public source gives the minutes to the next train. İBB's GTFS dataset has not been touched since March 2024, so we stopped publishing frequencies derived from it.
Lift and exit counts per station
İBB publishes these for a couple of lines only. Rather than invent them for the whole network, we say nothing.
Transfer prices after the July rise
İBB did not republish the per-transfer amounts. On the fares page we give the last published ones with their date, not as if they were current.
Corrections and contact
If something here is wrong — a fare that changed, an hour that no longer holds, a station that opened — write to [email protected]. We fix it and log it, with the date, on Where the data comes from.
How the site is funded
The site is free to read and paid for by advertising shown alongside the content. Advertising has no influence on what we write: no sponsored articles, no payment to feature a line or a business, no affiliate schemes on tickets.
Who is behind this site
This site is run by the team at GoRandom, a small group based in the Basque Country in Spain who do two things that go together better than they sound: travel, and build websites.
Istanbul is not yet one of the cities we have set foot in — we are up to twenty and we move slowly. We would rather say so than pretend otherwise: what you read here does not come from our memories, it comes from what the operator publishes and from checking work we can show you.
The other half of what we know how to do is web development, and this site is the excuse to put the two together. We do not leave it sitting there: every fare and every timetable carries its source and the date we checked it, and they get revised when the operator changes something. The last thorough revision was in August 2026: the 20 July 2026 fare rise was applied (a full fare is ₺46.20, not ₺42) and every station page gained the passenger counts İBB publishes.
He decides what goes up, checks the data before it does, and answers the email. If you find a fare that has expired or a timetable that no longer holds, there is a specific person to write to.
Sources
- Metro İstanbul — lines, service hours and the Ücret Tarifeleri (fares) page.
- İBB Open Data Portal — the "Rail Systems Station-Based Passenger and Journey Counts" dataset, where every station figure on this site comes from.
- İBB Council decisions and dated Turkish press, for when a tariff takes effect.
- Network map: Metro İstanbul A.Ş. / İBB.