Boston Subway Time-Scale Map | Hacker News Reader

Boston Subway Time-Scale Map

stonebrowndesign.com

77 pointspushmatrix30 comments

Would be very cool to see this for NYC. Obviously, there's no "center" like Boston has, but if you just considered the center to be the square of 'midtown' from 14th to 57th st, and 8th ave to Lexington, and only drew the lines emanating from outside that, it would work the same.

And have a separate version where everything emanates from the Financial District.

Would be AWESOME for comparing commute times when looking at job/apartment locations. You could even add half the interval between trains, to make it even more realistic for planning.

This would be very cool as an interactive thing where you can select your own center. Hell, it'd be great for apartment hunters who can just select wherever their work is and go from there.

Mapnificent might be what you're looking for: http://www.mapnificent.net/

Wow! What a totally crazy and awesome tool.

The "bubble map" you get is quite clever.

Would be even more interesting if you could overlay different commute times, e.g. in 5-minute intervals, and produce something topographic-map-style.

It's a bit slow and prone to crashes, but mapnificent is a decent tool for this: http://www.mapnificent.net/

The major drawback of this map is that it gives you no clue as to how to actually get to the nearest subway station, and it doesn't tell you which subway station is close to your destination. By focusing only on travel time it has abstracted away a bit too much of the information that people expect to get from a subway map. (For example, the NYC subway map shows the locations of subway stations with respect to major streets and landmarks.)

Also, in most transit systems, travel time can depend significantly on the time of day you're traveling. Express trains don't always run and the time between trains increases during off-peak hours.

I'd guess from your comment that don't likely live in Boston or have spent very little time here.

The way the city is set up, the T lines basically just run out toward other stuff. Only when you are in downtown can you find multiple lines close so most of the time you have only one option if any.

Check this map out: http://mapsof.net/map/boston-metro-map#.UVnvrodOTYg

In NYC, you can usually walk to different lines quickly.

There may be express trains in Boston, but I don't know of any??? I don't use the T to commute, so maybe someone else knows?

There aren't express trains, but it would still be useful to have some weekend service posted, especially for the green line (of which there are 5 once you get west enough!).

There ARE express trains, they're just not scheduled in advance (for example the b line goes express from bu east to Washington to make up for delays quite frequently).

The regular T map (http://www.mbta.com/schedules_and_maps/subway/) is also abstract, just not as usefully. It doesn't show where stations are or what's near them.

IMHO criticizing this map for its lack of spatial accuracy is sort of missing the point. It's not designed to be in the space dimension, it's designed to be in the time dimension.

The official itself is very good for determining location and the nearest T stop to various landmarks. If that fails, then Google maps is even better.

However, this map is damn good for easily and immediately visualizing how long it takes to get from stop to stop.

As a resident of Boston, this is correct except for the regular delays of the Green Line. Consider this map only accurate for the three other lines and add 20 minutes to the map's estimate for the Green Line and you're probably in the ballpark.

Add 5-10 even for the Red line

Some alternative map purposing for the London Underground. http://www.steveprentice.net/tube/TfLSillyMaps/

If you are interested in transit visualization and user experience, you might like Ljuba Miljkovic's "Transporter: A Real-Time Public Transit App Designed for Bay Area Riders"

http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/student_projects/Trans...

Something slightly related: the timetables made by E.J. Marey, shown in the middle of this blog post:

http://marlenacompton.com/?p=103

They're also shown in Tufte's "Visual Display of Quantitative Information."

I like this for the design, but for something that's even more practical for distance discovery, check out this Chicago times map: http://www.mapnificent.net/chicago/

Wow, this is very cool.

I am trying to choose which station to live near in Tokyo and I wish this existed to compare commute times from the station where I will near.

I would love to see this color-coded with average house/apartment prices --- to see if each arc is equitable or if you can see a pattern ( +10% by the water, etc).

Housing prices also depend heavily on a neighborhood's crime rate, school rankings and other quality of life issues which vary significantly even among physically adjacent neighborhoods (at least there are lots of examples of that in NYC). So I doubt you'd find a simple relationship between time from the city center and real estate prices.

At least in Boston, distance to a T station seems to be the strongest factor correlating with apartment prices: http://www.wbur.org/2013/01/30/boston-apartments-heat-map

But there are many exceptions. For example, Cambridge (red), Somerville (yellow), Chelsea (green) and Roxbury (blue) are all within approximately the same distance of the center.

Distance to a T station, not to downtown. Cambridge and Somerville are considerably more expensive than Roxbury generally. Within any of the neighborhoods you listed, you'll find that rent goes up as you get closer to a T station.

I overlayed this map on a heat map of 2013 rents in Boston: http://imgur.com/oZoCDtV

It's not 100% accurate, but it gives you a rough estimate of time to the Hub vs. rent. In general, the biggest selling point for Boston apartment seekers is proximity to the T and time to commute to the the Financial District (near Goverment Center). Areas near colleges (BU, MIT, Havard, Northeastern) are also high rent because college students eat up most of the housing.

As an active apartment seeker in Boston, the original heatmap data source is generally pretty accurate: http://www.jefftk.com/apartment_prices/index

Unfortunately it doesn't line up all that well because of the heavy distortion of the time scale map. For example the red area in the upper left corner is clearly the Mass Ave corridor in Cambridge, which in real life lines up with the red line, but you can't see that in the overlay.

Interesting way of looking at it. Now if only they'd fix up the boston subway (aka the T) and get that green line extension done.

Sorry, but I only made it halfway because I had to squint to read the text. More contrast would be nice.

Fix with your browser's style inspector or if you can access a javascript console:

document.getElementsByClassName('paragraph')[1].style.color = '#000000 !important'

I find alternate maps like this fascinating. You really don't need to bother with much of the description though - the maps speak for themselves!

How would I do this on Chrome? Thanks.

Right click -> Inspect Element -> click Console (right most tab) -> paste code and press return.

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