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This is the thing people forget about maps - any map is a falsehood, because it's not the thing mapped. It has a purpose and will bend various things to best serve that purpose. A subway map is NOT a walking map; it's (usually) a guide to the transit system and how to get from station to station.

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In London lots of platform signs are directional - "northbound" vs "southbound", "eastbound" vs "westbound". Navigating them effectively often requires knowing (at least vaguely) which direction you're moving in. This map completely removes that intuition, in that sense it's strictly less useful than the default TfL one.

What used to drive me nuts was the announcements referring to the platform _number_ on the underground. Always struck me as the most user-unfriendly way to do it - it works above ground because you can usually see other platforms from the one you're on. But underground you may as well call them by flower names or famous pigs of history for all it helps in navigating.

A subway isn't just any random graph, though, and preserving the information about geography at least to some extent makes it more useful in a variety of real life cases.

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