MTA tests new subway map that evokes jettisoned 1972 version
wsj.com
wsj.com
Very cool
Fixing that and catching up to public transit throughout the world is more important than redesigning the way the map looks.
I have corrective lenses that give me normal vision, and I have to really squint to make out station names and bullets on the digitized system maps that the panels display. I feel terrible for anyone whose vision is even slightly worse than mine, much less tourists who have enough trouble with the printed maps.
If only it were feasible to install high DPI eink panels instead. But then those ads wouldn’t be anywhere near as attention grabbing, would they?
But:
> I think the bigger offense with the displays isn't the ads (the subway is already plastered with them, and the new screens will pay for themselves in that manner)
Of course seeing ads isn't new -- the point is the displays were put in at least partially to serve as station info. c.f. https://new.mta.info/accessibility/stationlab/CICs
In my experience, they literally do not function that way, they don't give information in a timely manner such that you can decide whether to wait or not without standing there waiting till it finally shifts to the screen with service info, which can take minutes.
But maybe we can agree both are big issues :) -- the map thing is certainly something I sympathize with -- all in all, I think the displays are a failure other than for making ad revenue, so we the transiters have lost again.
The model (which is pretty common in major cities) is that an ad agency paid to put those things there.
In London farebox income in 2019 was £4.9b, and advertising was £158m.
If there were no adverts (and thus the resulting theft of brain power - especially on moving ones on screens), a tube fare would have to increase from £2.40 to £2.47, a 3% increase.
It's like this with many services that you buy - Sky TV's total subscription income was £11b, advertising £1.4b. A £30/month package coming with 20 minutes of adverts an hour would cost £34 with no adverts at all.
(In reality I don't pay for sky, because it has adverts, so I guess adverts mean the cost goes from £30 to £0)
Advertising is a cancer on the world.
London is already really good with restricting obstructive adverts in the city to buses and cabs; it's a pity that the underground is stuffed to the brim with them.
Is that how you get to the love boat?
I dont know if you've ever been to another country with unsupported connectivity, but it kinda sucks when you are low on battery and need to figure out where to go.
look up and use the public, free ad-funded network
or look down and use your private, paid-for ad-free terminal
https://www.dezeen.com/2011/08/08/london-tube-map-by-mark-no...
Tokyo has a somewhat similar issue, except more so due to the presence of multiple networks and the cost from swapping networks on your journey (which you don’t notice until a few days in when you realise you’ve drained your suica surprisingly quickly).
The London tube maps remains geographically inaccurate, and instead focuses on clarity around how the different lines interact with each other. Making it very easy to plan routes on the tube, but not necessarily understand where the stations are physically located.
It’s interesting, as a Londoner I really don’t care about the location of the station. When talking about how to get places, people use tube stations as the landmarks. So you don’t need to know where they are, only how you get to them via the tube network. If needed their physical location, you would use a street map, not the tube map. As such I think making the tube map geographically accurate, at the cost of making it harder to plan routes, would be a net negative.
Also you're right about landmarks. In NY, you use the grid system to navigate. Therefore it makes sense to tie transport links to the grid. London has no logical road system and the landmarks are more spread out.
The zones exist to increase pricing for travelling though congested parts of the network, and provide cheaper fares for people that avoid them. Historically the busiest part of London was just the centre. But the cites evolved quite a bit, and now has multiple busy spots like Canary Wharf, Shoreditch and soon Battersea. So it makes sense to put them in zone 1 from a traffic density perspective.
That's not a particularly huge deal given that Staten Island only has one subway line anyways, but I find it funny.
(I could also nitpick how this hurts the map. It's a long walk to change from the 2/3 to the 4/5 at Fulton St., but it's a shorter distance on the map than the 1/2/3 to the F/M/L at 14th St. Though by no means is that a short walk either. You can't really use the current map to plan transfers. Who knows how many stairs you'll have to go up and down, or how many avenues you'll have to walk.)
What is the point of including Staten Island on maps displayed on the Manhattan, Long Island and mainland parts of New York, given that you can never catch a train there? Conversely, what is the point of displaying maps showing the rest of New York on Staten Island? Especially given that there is only one public transport connection between the two!
> [T]he current subway map combines multiple lines into one where they run together, while the new version shows as many as four tracks running parallel to each other, like on the 4, 5 and 6 lines.
> [Sarah] Meyer, chief customer officer of the MTA, has been thinking about ways to better communicate how the subway really works, delays and all, since she took the customer chief role in 2018.
> Faced with years of planned maintenance work, the MTA last year introduced a live subway map that customers can access on their electronic devices [1]. It lets passengers check exactly where trains are in the system, and which lines might be closed or diverted, offering a visual alternative to the paper maintenance notices pinned up around stations.
> Ms. Meyer’s team wanted to better convey some of the same information through static maps in stations, for example making it instantly clear which lines aren’t operating on the weekend.
> But the design of the current map—which combines multiple lines into one wherever they run parallel and separates out trains that in reality sometimes run on the same tracks—makes that “redrawing” harder, Ms. Meyer said.
I especially love the problem space of transit maps. Transit feels like a purely topological endeavour. What nodes connect, how, and what are the edge lengths? But the moment you want to act outside the transit system, you then care about Cartesian accuracy as well. You want to know how far something is from two different transit stops. These kinds of maps can really trick you big time.
When it comes to static maps, you’ve gotta make a compromise. But when it comes to dynamic maps, we could do a ton more. Imagine a map that can trivially toggle and animate between being transit system legible, and surface-level legible. Where in one mode all the lines are nicely laid out to see how they link and their trip times. And another mode every node animates to a new position where they represent the Cartesian coordinates on the surface (another lie of course.)
And what measure do the edge lengths represent: time, distance, map typography?
There's also a difference of height. It might take 10 minutes just to get from an underground station to the street level right above it, and you can't go in a straight line there either.
That's really throwing the baby out with the bathwater. For a map of a city, you can get all three just fine. The curvature of the paper will be within margin of error.
When it comes to static maps, you’ve gotta make a compromise
In the article, the MTA talks about displaying the new topological map alongside an accurate geographic map, so that subway users will have both sets of information readily available and clearly distinguished from each other.
That said, I think think both maps side by side would be great. They complement each other for being good for different things.
* the modern Vignelli (thankfully) fixes some of the 1972's version issues with things taken from the current map; namely, most of the glaring geographic issues have been fixed (50th/8th is not in the wrong place in the grid compared to 50th/7th, Broadway is now a diagonal line instead of a stair-stepping line at 90 degree angles); and the new map uses the same common-trunk coloring scheme that uses 9 colors as opposed to 1972's one color per distinct service (for something like 25+ colors).
The new metro "diagram" that tries to to clearly show information about how the routes work, without being geographically accurate.
The new map that is geographically accurate, but less detailed with respect to the routes, but also shows selected bus stations.
Optionally, in lower Manhattan, a third geographic map that for lower Manhattan blown up to the be the same size as the others (and allowing more detail). A smaller blown-up version is included in in the main geographical map as an inset, with greater detail, but perhaps not as much as the fully sized version? Unclear.
Sure, traveling between any two points inside the subway is slightly easier, but what happens when you want to decide which station is closest to a landmark, or which would make for a nicer walk. You need to be able to see the geography to make travel decisions in real cases.
I wonder if that happened in the 70s, but this time most people will just give up and use Google Maps.
They're tremendously useful and I prefer them to the geographically accurate maps.
Also if you want the station closest to a landmark, simply travel to the station named after that landmark...
How is Google Maps doing when you want to go to one of those stations?
It’s not actually that confusing in practice in Manhattan, since the entire borough is a grid. Google Maps locates the correct station just fine (you can search by bullet), but it’s very easy to just follow the avenues to get to whatever station you want.
But that hasn’t prevented TfL from giving stations unique and useful names. Hell, I think most stations in london have been renamed at some point, several of them have been renamed multiple times.
Use a proper street map? That what we do in London. Find out destination on a street map, then decide which tube station to use. Then the tube map is only used to make routing decisions within the network, not broader navigation around the city.
The printed map is primarily for people with nothing else, where their battery died for instance.
It just feels like this project was designed in a clean room, and nobody spent much time in the shoes of the people using this.