The redesign of New York City's subway map [video] | Hacker News Reader

The redesign of New York City's subway map [video]

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48 pointswallflower21 comments

In case you were wondering as well and came here first: 'a short documentary about a revolutionary redesign of New York City's iconic subway map'

Thank you!

Thank you.

Thank you

Thanks

Thnx

Live map can be used here: https://map.mta.info

And is it just me, or does the map load reaaaaly slowly?

The new map is beautiful, but not very useful if you're waiting a minute for it to load. Especially if you're in the subway with potentially limited service?

The video mentioned high FPS, but from my experience, it was extremely slow and clunky. I notice that they were using React and probably using it incorrectly.

If you want to try the map for yourself, it's available here: https://map.mta.info/

The comments about the "old" map (not the original Italian one, the one we all have a hardcopy of on our bookshelves) being unreadable strike me as a little off. Maps are always going to be contextual, and a mark of a "good" map in my mind has always been if, after a certain amount of time using it, you no longer have to rely on it. Having spent a lot of time in New York, traveling there when I was younger and now for business but never living there for longer than a summer, the "old" map served this purpose pretty well. Maybe it was a little hostile to the user, but this sort of encourages you to just straight up memorize things. This isn't to say the maps should be hostile as a means to makes people memorize its contents, rather that this one was maybe "just usable enough that tourists can get around" and "just hostile enough that people who use the subway a lot would just memorize things". Traveling from JFK to Grand Central and then up to Columbia became muscle memory after the second trip.

A live map also reflects all the current changes the subway is underway, such as maintenance, closed stations, etc… Of course people managed to go use the subway for decades using this old map, what they're trying to do is improve on things. I for sure would like to see that kind of tech used for other subways in the world.

Most other subways will just stop services on a segment and use buses to fill the gap.

New York is rather unique in that the subway was engineered, or rather over-engineered, to be able to reroute trains. (E.g. This E train will be making local stops in Queens and running over the M line to West 4th St.

I mean the MTA does that too

The N/Q into Astoria, the F line in Downtown Brooklyn

What I mean to say is that the level of changes the map needs to reflect is pretty much only useful to New York, since they are the only system consistently rerouting trains rather than stopping segments entirely.

Yeah, I’m not denigrating the live map. It’s great, and while it seems it’ll be a while until I can test it out in real time (thanks, COVID), the design looks fantastic to me.

This is certainly interesting, but is anyone else even a little sad that the headline here isn't "The redesign of New York City's subway system"? (NB: improvements in design are real improvements, no disagreement there.)

We have had so much progress in the world of bits, and comparatively little in the world of atoms, much to our detriment. The efforts presently underway to make new tunnels orders of magnitude cheaper excite me.

The world below the ground in a city as old as NYC is fascinating, and there are certainly an astounding number of physical and social obstacles to extending the transit system there. But with the city so empty and facing such profound change, isn't right now the time to be thinking big?

The first thing I saw when zooming in on the map was two trains approaching head-on. I had to remind myself that this is a map and not a plan.

Now I'd love another zoom step where you can see the tracks and the signalling.

This seems like such an exciting project. I live in Macon, GA and while I probably would never use it, I'd like more feedback from folks that do use it.

Did they deliver? Were there issues? Are there still issues? How much better has this made things for folks? Worse?

Yeah... love the video, but all things that are shiny aren't necessarily actually great. ;) I'm optimistic, but skeptical. .

For previous discussion on the new NYC live subway map: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24842270

Ha, I didn’t expect to see Robert Penner pop up, whose easing functions are kind of ubiquitous in the front-end world.

Great for people already experts in navigating the ny transit system. A ux nightmare for anyone approaching it blind.

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