Quite frankly, there’s really no reason for this map to be diagrammatic at all outside of Manhattan – which, owing to its famous grid forms a diagram naturally. In real life, it’s a straight shot from Brighton Beach to Coney Island/Stillwell Avenue – look what the diagram does: All of the lines down to Coney Island are treated differently and it’s a visual nightmare. This kind of stuff appears randomly all over the map: some lines follow the roads that they’re aligned to in real life fairly faithfully, while others stair-step their way to their destination like a 90-degree-angle-only diagram.
And inexplicably, the N and Q don’t cross the river anywhere near the Manhattan Bridge, but continue all the way down to lower Manhattan and apparently share the same tunnel as the 4 and 5 to get to Brooklyn! The station order is correct – Canal Street to DeKalb Avenue – but the route taken on the map to get there is sheer insanity. Because of the simplified paths drawn, the B and D completely miss the bridge – clearly shown on the base layer underneath it – and seem to cross the river in a new, previously undiscovered tunnel. Let’s take a look at the services that travel across the Manhattan Bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn – the B, D, N and Q. However, the paths the subway lines take between these points often bear no relation to the base map, or even reality. And this is true – for the station locations, which are fairly accurately placed. The main selling point of this map is that it has the clarity of a diagram but the fidelity of a geographical map – “The best of both worlds!” the articles happily proclaimed this morning – but the reality is more like “Jack of all trades master of none.” As much as I try, I simply can’t see any real benefit to this approach.Ī geographical base map is meant to give veracity to the data layers above it, grounding them in the real world. It does run somewhat better on mobile, but we’ll have to see if the speed on desktop computers improves over the next few days, as it’s not really usable at present. With all this hoopla, I had to go investigate myself… and I came away unimpressed.įirst things first: the map is as slow as heck in Chrome on my iMac, and barely works at all in Safari, neither of which are particularly encouraging starts. There’s certainly been a big PR push, with effusive articles being written about it and even a mini-documentary film by Gary Huswit of Helvetica fame. The MTA released a beta version of a new online real-time subway map this morning, supposedly a fusion between the design sensibilities of the Vignelli diagram and the modern subway map’s geographical pragmatism.
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