The subway doesn’t keep to a strict schedule (it has one in theory but no one would depend on it), and has anywhere between 3 and 20 minute headways (time between trains).
You can sort of kind of get close to 1-2 minutes of slack if you have an app telling you how far away the subway is (CityMapper has this feature), but you can’t really time your sleep or known work hours for making a specific subway.
I mean super-digital people really do. If your train only comes every 20 min, you absolutely have your eye on the app and change the speed you eat breakfast in the morning, or decide you can reply to 4 more emails before leaving work.
There are tons of apps with live train countdowns. They're probably the biggest improvement to NYers quality of life in the past 30 years honestly, with ridesharing in second place.
