NYC Subwaysheds

It sort of helps that Tokyo was firebombed into oblivion roughly 80 years ago. Much easier to build, expand, and maintain. Also an entirely different culture around transportation and property rights not to mention civic pride.

As someone who's a subway "maximalist": despite my (and millions of others') desire for a radically expanded network, I don't think we'll see one. The political (and capital) costs of expanding the network are immense, and the incentives are all wrong: the MTA is a state agency rather than a city one, meaning that a perpetually underfunded and worse-than-acceptable subway system is a useful piece of political leverage against the city.

Instead, we may see some "expansion" the network by reviving old lines that have fallen into disuse and taking over industrial/freight lines that see less use. The IBX[1] is one such development; my hope is that the MTA also considers re-expanding the G's service back out to Forest Hills (as it was before 2001)[2].

TL;DR: Massive capital investment and home rule need to happen.

[1]: https://new.mta.info/project/interborough-express

[2]: https://greenpointers.com/2023/01/23/op-ed-5-ways-to-improve...

No one likes the current design of subway systems. Therefore it won't see any expansions. The new expansions currently in play are real deep and real expensive. Again no one likes this new design either. No one likes the system of elevated rails. No one likes the bussing system.

What do people like? The expanding ferry line. The trolley on 3rd Ave Brooklyn. The air train. Cheaper fares.

Until there is some new tech that can get people excited about public transportation again, we won't be seeing any new investments.

>I'm working on a

It's all bravado commenting on something you're working on in the comments of someone else's actual working site. Let's see the comments from a link to your site? Thought not

No, it is clearly not as the pigeon flies. That is incorrect.

When I click on my local subway stop it seems entirely accurate, and the stations don't form any kind of circle at all. In fact I can't find any subway stop origin that seems to form anything even close to a circle.

Also, according to the "about" it's calculating from actual subway schedules.

And it has nothing to do with street grids. It's subway trips, not walking.

It's using some hybrid of isochrones & walking time "as the crow flies." The subway travel is in isochrones, but once you exit the subway the walking time assumes walking in straight lines with no obstructions in any direction. So yes that's inaccurate but it's relevant that only the walking time is done so. I assume subway ride time is based on subway schedule times.

I did this exact thing in 1st year geography. Gotta use the network analysis tool, not spatial analysis. Distance along road segments, not the Euclidean distance tool.

Zillow already has that. You input an address and it tells you the distance in time by transportation method on each property details screen. You can also sort properties according to distance from the given address. The software labels it a "work" address, but you will face no consequences for using an address that you do not work at.

I've sort of done this using the Walk score transit heat maps (they have similar for biking and walking as well) for getting a more broad feel for what areas are walkable/bikeable/less car dependant while house shopping, using a user script that takes the map tiles from Walkscore and injects them into the Google maps instance on Zillow. However, you could definitely generate the distance from a point heat/contour maps using QGIS/OSM data and overlay the tiles that way as well.

Would be super nice if this was built into Zillow, or any MLS browsing tool for that matter...

It’s still interesting/useful, though. Once you require factoring in average train wait times and stuff like that the project is going to be way too complex to ever be achievable.

That might not be an entirely wrong assumption to make. An office worker's working hours usually has some amount of slack, and people are willing to adjust their schedule to minimize wait time. No point waiting 25 minutes every day when you can get up 5 minutes earlier and wait basically zero.

I had the same surprise. Which raises an interesting question: does that count as "breaking the back button"?

Theoretically, no: the back button is working as expected. At the same time, it was a significantly worse experience for me because it took a lot longer to go back to the "parent" page (HN).

Mine seems pretty accurate, but it seems to be counting from when my train departs, not when I get to the station.

Also it's not clear if it's counting waiting time when transferring, which would make a big difference.

There is no direct bridge or tunnel between Manhattan and Staten Island, only a ferry. Staten Island is connected to Brooklyn via the Verrazano Bridge.

It's far too long for a bridge, which would also then cut the harbor in half anyway.

On top of what 'sempron64 said: there was a plan to construct a subway tunnel between Brooklyn and Staten Island[1], but construction was canceled nearly a century ago.

The Verrazano Bridge itself was designed under Robert Moses's eye, and he shut down the idea of a subway link early on[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staten_Island_Tunnel

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/1956/04/09/archives/moses-bars-train...

You can, if just barely, to/from both lower Manhattan and Midtown -- by ferry. However presumably those routes are not factored into this map.

There is no bridge or tunnel. One was started back in the 1920s and parts of it still remain but it was never completed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staten_Island_Tunnel

It’s kind of a political hot potato few want to touch these days. A tunnel feels like a no brainier but a lot of NIMBY types in Staten Island don’t want a fast connection to the rest of the city as it would likely change the area dramatically.

~25min on the Ferry which runs every half hour / every 20 minutes during rush hour

Ferry runs 24/7 and is free.

The Verrazano bridge is usually baked up with traffic as is the two major highways feeding into it: Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) and the Belt Parkway. To get from SI to Manhattan by car you take the bridge to the BQE then battery tunnel into Manhattan but that's over and hour in traffic. Ferry is another option. There's no connecting subway tunnel and a single small train line runs north south to the east. Weird borough - feels like long island or upstate. Even had a shanty ghost town to the south.

Staten Island is south of Brooklyn, as others have noted, and a good distance away — so even if we had a rail link via bridge or tunnel to Brooklyn, you’d need more work to bring it to Manhattan. You might think of using existing lines, but the closest credible line, the R train, has capacity for adding such trains, and for taking those trains into Manhattan… but it runs local along Brooklyn’s 4th Ave, making the overall trip much slower. It does join up with the D/N lines after a short distance (4 Ave Express), but the D/N has capacity limitations both at that point and later when they join the B/Q and cross the Manhattan Bridge to the 6th Ave Express/Broadway Express line. You could displace either of those services to the local track and send them into lower Manhattan via the Montague Tube link, at the cost of making trips down to Coney Island / Stillwell Ave much slower and serving areas in lower Manhattan which are less relevant than midtown.

There is some remote possibility of going out of the way to link to the F train, which even has an essentially-unused express track (portions of the system are 3-track but more of the relevant route is a full 4-track). The big problem with this is that it eventually dumps you onto the 6 Ave Local, and 6 Ave is pretty much full, local or otherwise. The only other option is the IND Crosstown, which goes to Bed-Stuy, Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Queens instead of Manhattan. The smaller problem is that the express train stops here are awkwardly located, and the potential transfer points for other lines tend to be crowded.

In short, all the good subway capacity into Manhattan is already claimed by existing services. This makes sense! The best ones are all full and the ones with spare capacity are less popular for good reason. It’d be a waste otherwise.

If you’re looking to build more capacity, you’ll need something dramatic like connecting the Second Avenue Subway. At that point I’d want to hook it up to the B/D tracks via the Rutgers Tube, send the D in Manhattan onto the new line, and divert the D in Brooklyn via the F express tracks, instead of the Brooklyn 4 Ave Express. (You could trade the B line with some clever swaps near Chrystie as an alternative.) This would free up capacity for the Staten Island service on the 4 Ave link, a much better proposition.

But given that building the existing Phase 1 mile-and-a-bit of the Second Avenue Subway ran billions of dollars and took over 70 years to happen… you may see the size of the problem you face adding many new miles in Phase 3 to connect it to the area near the Christie St Connection.

Now the pandemic might have mitigated some of this, but it’s also mitigated the benefit of the scheme in the first place, and it has strained the budgets for such projects too.

Google maps is pretty basic for its routing. For example, I use a skateboard to commute to transit stops. It effectively cuts walk times in half or more and is easy to carry on a crowded train. There is no way to set this average walking/skating speed, however, so the routes they choose are not optimal and require my own localized knowledge of the transit network and schedule, and knowing the best routes for skating fast. This doesn't just affect skaters, but people who might have a bike or scooter they can use between transit trips. You can imagine all the much more optimal routings that become possible when you can suddenly move 10-15mph on a whim between point A and B.

There are buses running the transverses. I think this map only does subway. Check Google Maps transit directions and you'll see.

Because it’s a niche site and that’s what it’s about?

“Interesting niche site about birds in the authors backyard. But why doesn’t it also talk about the trees in my backyard?”

Why would you go to subawaysheds.com to learn about taxicab stands? that would obviously be taxicabstands.com.

Why just NYC? Because does anything else exist outside of NYC? Maybe atlantic city, or the catskills, or niagra falls, but everything else is just unimportant

As a New Yorker: 40 minutes is roughly my boundary between "ordinary trip with no prior thought" and "I'll set aside a dedicated time and/or day to make this trip."

The city's bus lines are much more variable in service, and don't offer as many interborough routes.

If you open it up to include LIRR, NJT and Metro North, Penn Station / Times Square / Grand Central is probably the winner. :)

remember https://www.triptropnyc.com/ ?

I used this to find a place to stay when I worked on Canal, ended up finding Sunset Park neighborhood around 36th street station and loving the area.

Here's the author's source code: https://github.com/chriswhong/nyc-subway-isochrones

If they were using the Isochrone API, the buffers around the subway stations would take in account the street grid vs a circle.

That's really cool that Mapbox now offers an API to do this. It seems like it also factors in elevation as well!

Just comparing to my own intuition, I'd guess it's using a train's departure from the origin station as the "start" time for a trip.

Yep, exactly my thought. Super valuable if scaled to be more accurate.

L train estimates are generally a pipe dream on this site, a beautiful beautiful pipe dream.

Is this true? I haven't taken the Franklin Ave shuttle in a decade, but I remember it being on the top floor of the Franklin Ave station (with the C platform being in the basement).

I’ve taken that connection so I assure you it is! The S train is elevated and quite a walk from the C platform but they are accessible from each other (including via elevator, which is a rarity)

If you live 2 blocks away, you probably often see the green skyway that crosses Fulton to connect the C and S ;)

Edit: in the map they aren't connected. It shows them as two separate stations. Im arguing that they are the same station. And one can transfer easily from the "C" to the "Shuttle" and vice versa.

Yeah, the G tries but it is nowhere near sufficient. Then there is the E and A. You would have to ride those for hours since you have to go through Manhattan.

With the exception of three stops on the UWS that took about a century to build[0] and one additional stop on the 7, ~all of the subway stops were built 80+ years ago, via one of three independent private train companies. Those three companies eventually went bankrupt and were taken over by the city, and then later the state.

So I wouldn't call anything a "design decision" in this case, insofar as it was never designed intentionally to be a comprehensive public transit system the way we think of it today.

[0] Not an exaggeration - Phase 1 was originally supposed to be completed before WWII.

https://www.chronotrains.com/en/station/2988507-Paris/5 ???