New York's New Digital Subway Map

An anonymous reader shares a report: The date was April 20, 1978; the scene, the Great Hall of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art on Astor Place. On the stage where Abraham Lincoln once spoke sat two men, the Italian modernist Massimo Vignelli and the cartographer John Tauranac, constituting two sides of the Great Subway Map Debate. Six years earlier, Vignelli's firm had reimagined the New York subway map into a groovy rainbowlike diagram, one that graphic designers loved and many riders found hard to navigate. Tauranac was the head of a committee that had engaged Michael Hertz Associates to re-re-draw it into the topographically grounded, graphically busy, and not particularly elegant map that -- modest updates aside -- is the one we all still use. Vignelli's diagram was a joy to look at and was nearly useless as an aboveground navigation tool. Hertz and Tauranac's map functioned pretty well as a map to getting around town but inspired comparatively little delight. Vignelli said the Hertz map made him "puke." Tauranac countered with paeans to real-world use. (The moderator for the evening was Peter Blake, New York's first architecture critic.) By the end of the Great Debate, the aesthetes sensed they were going to lose, and indeed they did. Hertz's practical problem-solving work replaced Vignelli's the following year, and the aesthetes have been rolling their eyes ever since. Jonathan Barnett, then a City College professor, summed up the evening by asking, "Why can't we have both maps?"

As of this morning, perhaps we do.

The MTA has unveiled its new digital map, the first one that uses the agency's own data streams to update in real time. It supersedes the blizzard of paper service-change announcements that are taped all over your subway station's entrance. It's so thoroughly up-to-the-moment that you can watch individual trains move around the system on your phone. Pinch your fingers on the screen, and you can zoom out to see your whole line or borough, as the lines resolve into single strands. Drag your fingers apart, and you'll zoom in to see multiple routes in each tunnel springing out, widening into parallel bands -- making visible individual service changes, closures and openings, and reroutings. Click on a station, and you can find out whether the elevators and escalators are working. The escalators at 34th Street-11th Avenue, as of press time, are 18 for 20. And the whole thing resolves the Great Subway Map Debate almost by accident along the way, because when you're zoomed-in it draws on the best parts of Vignelli's diagram -- the completeness of its parallel, stranded routes and the swoopy aesthetics -- and the zoomed-out version echoes the Hertz map's best features, its graspable consolidation of multiple lines into single ones and its representation of the physical world.

Re:

[Joey Vegetables]

That's a bummer. Performance will be important if this is to be a true improvement over the old, non-interactive and non-realtime version that so many of us know and at least try to love.

Looked at it..

[Anonymous Coward]

Have to say, nicely done. Good marriage of aesthetics and real-world functionality.

Queens

[Random361]

Looks like they need to punch some new lines through Queens.

That's a shit map

[nagora]

I don't need to see islands and rivers. When did anyone ever get on the subway because they really fancied going to "Manhattan"? You get on the subway to go to a station. This map wastes my screen space and my time. Especially since it seems to have been programmed in GW Basic or something.

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[Ichijo]

This map wastes my screen space

Yes, it tries too hard to be in actual scale, and so usability suffers.

I mean, I don't care if two lines cross over each other and then cross back. That's not even a little bit useful to a transit rider.

I also don't care about linear distances between two stations. That doesn't help me get from A to B.

And if I'm reading it correctly, they have multiple stations with the same name but on different subway lines, like "23 St". If the purpose is to confuse the rider, that's a gre

Suits NY

[n0nsensical]

Sorry but it is useful info to transit riders in Manhattan who generally know to which Avenue and Street they are traveling, and would like to know without having to ask Google which station is nearest. And therefore they also generally know which 23rd St Station they want or are at because they know the Avenue, or can look at the map and find out. It's quite different from Tokyo or London where you have a clear center and spokes radiating out, it's linear. Can be confusing to tourists for sure but contrary to popular belief the locals are generally more than happy to help you. In any case the system was built for New Yorkers first and it suits them well enough.

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[n0nsensical]

And you would care about linear distance between stations when your destination is at the midpoint of two or three of them as it generally is :)

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[n0nsensical]

NY wasn't built for cars and buses nor was it built for pedestrians. It was built for horses. So as it turns out, you often find yourself traveling horse-distances under human-power, that is why the geography the system is built on is indeed important cause you don't want to find yourself a two-horse-buggy distance away from where you're going which can happen pretty easily!

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[Ichijo]

That's actually not helpful. What you really want to know is what's the nearest station to your destination.

London Tube Map

[aberglas]

Was the first topographical map that was universally adopted. Living in London for a while I got a very distorted view of the place because of that map. Stations far apart on the map were actually quite close together.

When visiting New York recently I rather liked the blend of topological and geographic mapping and found it very useful.

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[Mr. Barky]

You don't necessarily want the nearest station. You probably want the route that takes the shortest amount of time. The nearest station might require a circuitous route or changing lines, which might take significantly longer than another station on the same line but a little further. Your walking speed might also impact this calculation. If you have a walking impediment - such as a broken leg - you might truly want the route that minimizes walking. But if you are a speed-walker, the best route might be fur

Re:

[Ichijo]

it is useful info to transit riders in Manhattan who generally know to which Avenue and Street they are traveling

But it's not useful for transit riders to know the name of the neighborhood or any notable landmarks in the area that might match the station name, right?

It's quite different from Tokyo or London where you have a clear center and spokes radiating out, it's linear.

There's no clear center in Tokyo, just the circular Yamanote Line.

Can be confusing to tourists for sure...the system was built for Ne

Re:

[nagora]

Sorry but it is useful info to transit riders in Manhattan who generally know to which Avenue and Street they are traveling, and would like to know without having to ask Google which station is nearest.

Well then they should have renamed the stations to fit the functionality needed. That's one of the worst systems I've ever seen. I'm gobsmacked that no one has fixed it.

Basically, what you're saying is that the map is most useful for people who don't need it!

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[Joey Vegetables]

New Yorkers are indeed friendly and helpful, as long as you don't get in their way or act like a jerk. Usually if I'm there it's a weekend, and there tend to be service changes and disruptions on weekends, but I've never once had any problem getting help to figure out how to get where I needed to go. Often it's been volunteered before I ever had to ask. Despite recent events, New Yorkers are justifiably proud of their city, and their messy but effective network of subways, buses, ferries and trains, whic

Made for Chrome or just crappy?

[t4eXanadu]

I tried viewing it in Firefox on Android and it's a mess. When I pinch to zoom all I get is a giant "MTA Beta" logo and it barely zooms out. Panning around is slow. I can't see any of the things the article claims. This seems to be utterly useless (at least in Firefox).

Good thing I don't need it.

They are all disasters ...

[PPH]

... in their own way.

First of all, transit maps need to show connections between beginning and end points. Not be geographically correct. Look to the London Underground map as an example. But the biggest problem is that the subway line identification convention seems all screwed up. And that's something you can't fix with map colors, names and other representations after the fact. The worst part of that is you can't fix it now. Try telling some geezer that his route home will no longer be called the blue line or the number 15 bus route and rage will ensue.

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[bluegutang]

The basic problem is that there are too many different service patterns. For example, routes 2, 3, 4, 5 use the same tracks in Brooklyn. When you get to Manhattan they separate, with the 2 and 3 going one direction, and the 4 and 5 another direction. Then you get further north in the Bronx, and they switch again, with the 2 and 5 on the same tracks and the 3 and 4 in other directions. Just like computers have "spaghetti code", New York has "spaghetti subway lines", with all the lines tangled together in a w

Re:

[Joey Vegetables]

You aren't wrong about the tendency for delays to propagate and cause chaos, but that's hard to avoid under the circumstances. That's why MTA has been investing literally billions of dollars in signaling systems and other measures to try to prevent those delays happening in the first place. Sadly, COVID will likely delay funding and hence progress on many of these projects, for multiple years if not decades.

Many people aren't aware that the NYC Subway was once three separate systems (BMT, IRT, and IND), w

Scripts from example.com?

[thoriumbr]

Why would this site load and send data to example.org? It's a new map, but not that useful. Mobile users should be the target, but it's very slow on mobile.