NYC’s new digital subway map
curbed.com
curbed.com
Or, instead of investing in a virtual map, invest in better speakers in the actual trains themselves so that people can actually hear "now arriving at 14th St Union Square next stop Astor" instead of "now arcshcshcshcsh Uniocshcsh next cshop cshcshcsh"
As for helping people orient themselves in the station... I have no idea. Using an app is the only way for tourists to figure out which direction to go. You have to know the terminal station to know which direction a train is going. The apps will (usually) tell you that. Having digital information inside the train would at least make people more immediately aware that they are on the wrong train.
The signs for which exit is which say the street corners or maybe just the streets, or maybe neither, but if I'm going to a new area, I have no idea what those streets are or which directions they go. So I would usually just have to stand above ground for a while and look at the business names, and look at the map on my phone, and look for the street signs, and eventually figure out which direction I needed to walk.
The solution is simple: paint a compass on the floor near the exits.
Depends on the borough and the line. My experience is mostly in Manhattan, where subways run (more or less) north/south, or as the MTA calls it uptown/downtown.
In those situations it's very simple to orient yourself from the train.
E.g. I'm going from 42nd street downtown to Astor Place on the IRT Lexington Ave Line (aka the 4 5 6). I get off at Astor Place and I immediately know north/south nee uptown/downtown. The train was heading south! I just need to remember that orientation as I ascend. And because it's a simpler station, it's easy to maintain that orientation as you leave the station.
stand above ground for a while
Yes it can sometimes be very confusing when exiting. They need much clearer indications at every exit. The natives who have been taking the same route for years have no problems, but the tourists can easily get confused.
The solution is simple: paint a compass on the floor near the exits.
This isn't quite so simple. I grew up in Manhattan (many years ago). For the longest time I thought that Manhattan was north/south. Certainly every subway map showed it that way. But it's not. Look at a Google map. Manhattan appears tilted about 20 degrees or so from true north.
The problem would be much worse in other boroughs. Some streets in Brooklyn or Queens are at about 45 degrees from the "cardinal directions" of N E S W. I think compass drawings offset so much from the actual street directions could be very confusing.
I think the newer phones are making this problem easier. Apple seems to have gone out of its way recently to emphasize that its phone is now better at discerning which way it's pointing.
An arrow <-- uptown downtown --> could work in most spots. Or an accurate compass that is tilted 20 degrees from the actual streets, still helpful. Or:
36th
^
| |
v
34thhttps://2.bp.blogspot.com/_F-LyTrM0YP0/TKM7nvWWJGI/AAAAAAAAH...
And before some smart-ass says it, it doesn't help that Avenues and Streets are perpendicular because that still doesn't tell N from S, or E from W. I always end up walking a block in the wrong direction just to orient myself.
It is interesting that somehow the conductors manage to get the marbles out of their mouth only for screaming at people for holding the doors open. I stick my foot in the door every time they do that - negative reinforcement. ;)
[1] https://www.mediabakery.com/AFS3899660
[2] https://freetoursbyfoot.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Red-a...
Seems like this isn't ready for primetime.
Try pushing back button after you have moved the map a little.
It could of course be thousands of other things too (and in combination), but it's not a bad place to start.
I usually don't notice slow websites, but it's noticeably blurry as I pan it around because it can't update at the 165Hz refresh rate of my monitor. Reminds me of gaming in 60Hz again.
They are doing some weird things. The Javascript console is littered with CORS warnings -- for making a cross-origin request to example.com every time a map tile needs to be loaded. That is probably an accident. They also seem to make HTTP requests for the map tiles whenever they enter the screen; they appears to be no caching whatsoever. (Maybe that's the right approach. The tiles do end up being served from the browser's cache. The network inspector claims they take about 1ms to load, which is probably slower than a lookup in a data structure in the Javascript program... but I didn't test it and I don't really trust that a "1ms" in there means "we timed it and it was exactly 1ms". It probably means "0 < time < 1", which could be anything.) Finally, they are serving this all out of what appears to be Azure blob storage; it's HTTP/1.1 so I guess we are opening a new TCP connection each time a tile needs to be loaded.
My TL;DR is I don't really do frontend stuff or performance stuff, but the site seemed especially slow. I bet they could clean it up in a few hours, so probably will.
I have a reasonably recent mid-range desktop and zooming in and out is impressively slow in Safari. It's even slower in Chrome.
when i do, it is abysmally slow.
seems about right.
i,ll go back to using my saved image, tyvm
Also looks like it changes the browser history on every interaction, ie any drag and drop, which seems, to me, to indicate some behind the scenes UUID tracking.
The main purpose is to show live updated route information.
I don't know why. It's updating the URL so that if you copy and paste it'll show the receiver the same view you have as the sender. They just need to be using history.replaceState to do that, rather than history.pushState.
And what is the sloppiness with the lines at DeKalb? Why is the out-of-service shading for the DNR under 4th Avenue this weekend so halfhearted? It's particularly hard to tell when the lines are skinny. I guess they were thinking of how good it was for Manhattan?
So tell me: when I click on tonight's map, what am I supposed to make of a one-way train service on the W, between Whitehall (where it usually stops) and 86th (which is not part of its usual route)? Is that actually a real thing? I am especially confused given that the more-information click takes me to a "look up service changes by line" page that doesn't show anything when I ask for service changes on the W.
And if the D train tonight is running northbound on 6th Avenue and southbound on 8th Avenue, why is the only unusual color displayed on 8th Avenue, given that people who catch the D expect it on its usual route under 6th Avenue?
I guess there's no hope for the F-diamond train but that probably doesn't matter much; I'm not sure it's even running post-pandemic...
This gets worse the more you look at it. A project manager wanted shininess, and they have it, but geez, can't anyone actually try to use the thing before showering it with praise?
Can anyone share why this is happening?
loadFutureServiceStatus.ts
export const FUTURE_SERVICE_STATUS_ENDPOINT = 'https://example.com';
....later on...
const serviceStatusFuture: SoapServiceStatus = await fetch(
FUTURE_SERVICE_STATUS_ENDPOINT,...New York City: https://map.mta.info/
Washington DC: https://gis.wmata.com/metrotrain/index.html
Chicago: https://www.transitchicago.com/traintrackermap/
Boston: https://www.mbta.com/schedules/Blue/line
I'd like to see more, but that's about all I could find from cities themselves.
India (not a subway, but the scale here makes it fascinating): https://railradar.railyatri.in/
I haven't found one for London (my hometown), but there is this interesting animation project that uses historical data to demonstrate passenger flow on the system. http://wgallia.com/#!underground
> What is the purpose of having a geographic map base when the subway diagram isn’t going to adhere to it? It’s obvious the coders started with station GIS data and tried to have a computer draw the connecting lines. Google used to do this and things just looked wrong with lines traveling to places they never actually went. Eventually they aligned their lines to their proper course.
Wow, he's so modest.
The whole thing feels a bit over-engineered to me at first glance.
The log is filled with CORS violations and requests to example.com.
This is not good.
But the water in New York City separates the boroughs a lot more than the Thames does to London. You can’t easily walk across the Hudson or East River, even if you’re near a bridge. Central Park matters too. So it’s not something than should just be abstracted away.
In short, because NYC is denser than London with more happening above ground, it was more helpful to see exactly where the stops were going to let you out, vs being easier to read.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/arts/design/the-subway-ma...
As a life long NYer: yes, you are. NYC subway map has looked like this for pretty much its entire existence. They tried flattening it recently to "modernize" it and it was universally panned.
Traditionally tourists all had that London A-Z, but nowadays I guess people just rely on their phones.
Flip side is my knowledge of London geography is pretty appalling. (Relative to say where I grew up, not necessarily to other people. The range of local geographical knowledge is probably worse here than in NYC.)
This is completely missing the point. No one cares where the train is. They care when it will arrive. Whether it is in a bend, it is waiting or whatever is totally irrelevant.
You need 2 things:
1) A map, whether digital or printed.
2) ETA time.
Why are they spending all this time and energy for something that is useless and unnecessary?
Getting about a million "Access to fetch at 'https://example.com/' from origin 'https://map.mta.info' has been blocked by CORS policy: Response to preflight request doesn't pass access control check: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. If an opaque response serves your needs, set the request's mode to 'no-cors' to fetch the resource with CORS disabled."
> "The Map" (Work & Co x Gary Hustwit, 2020) is a short documentary about a revolutionary redesign of New York City's iconic subway map. Filmmaker Gary Hustwit documents the process as digital agency Work & Co creates a new "live map" — one that updates in real-time — to help New Yorkers and tourists better plan their journeys. The film examines the evolution of wayfinding and user interfaces, and shows how good design and the latest digital technology can simplify one of the world's most complex transit systems. Featuring Felipe Memoria, Rachel Haot, Sarah Meyer, Joshua Gee, Marcela Abbade, Karina Sirqueira, Robert Penner, and Mohan Ramaswamy
We use all these APIs to power our Traintrackr boards[0], processing the predicted arrival data (or departure data if they only provide that) to show trains moving through the network.
However, these three APIs are all better than the BART API, which seems to change occasionally.
Has something changed? Do trains now have transponders or something?
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-d...
So they have a new data stream and _are not_ using the already provided GTFS stream from the MTA?*
1. very slow, even on FiOS
2. super ugly - example: https://photos.app.goo.gl/C8h8d39AeNrmEuMx5
Technical reasons, logistical reasons, integration (it’s actually like 4 systems combined) reasons... It’s not revolutionary in and of itself, just that New York now has one.
Note that while the loading gauges are different, other operational aspects (such as signalling and traction power) are the same. So the delay in getting this information up is less a factor of "there's multiple systems" and more "the MTA can't/won't modernize its systems to get this information."
https://nypost.com/2020/01/09/mta-goes-after-amateur-mapmake...
But even when it shows this to be the case, it does a very poor job of exposing the specific form of the deviance from normal.