
NYC Subway travel time map - anigbrowl
http://subway.nateparrott.com/
======
dheera
Semi-relevant but one thing I've been really wanting is a map directions app
that optimizes for _wasted time_ instead of time.

\- Taking train for 60 minutes (with a seat): 0 minutes wasted

\- Taking train for 20 minutes (without a seat): 20 minutes wasted

\- Taking bus for 60 minutes (with a seat): 30 minutes wasted (efficiency of
work cut by 50% due to bumpiness, people walking by and smacking my elbow,
etc.)

\- Taking an Uber for 20 minutes (driver is not chatty): 0 minutes wasted

\- Taking an Uber for 30 minutes (driver is chatty): 30 minutes wasted

\- Driving for 50 minutes: 60 minutes wasted (+10 minutes for parking)

\- Riding bicycle, running, or walking for 40 minutes in a day: 10 minutes
wasted (30/40 counts toward required-anyway daily exercise)

The application should factor in the probability of getting a seat on a train
or bus, the probability of an Uber driver being chatty based on crowdsourced
data, and simply optimize for the lowest mean wasted time for the entire
route.

~~~
dcgoss
At least for me, "wasted" is a matter of perspective. Personal interactions
and experiencing the surrounding world can be valuable — time is what you make
of it.

~~~
closeparen
Standing-room-only public transit vehicles are far and away the worst
interactions and experiences I encounter on a day-to-day basis.

They were valuable in that they motivated to bike most of the way, and
eventually to get promoted to a point where I could move into the city and
stop relying on transit. But aversion is probably not what you had in mind.

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esoteric_nonces
This is really cool.

I toyed with the idea of visualising travel time using colour heat maps.

London tube map [https://tubermap.com/](https://tubermap.com/)

(in the options you can turn on 'times').

I'd love to see the transit authorities themselves put together something that
encompasses all the possible forms of transport. Metro/bus/cycle etc.

~~~
JBlue42
I like this a lot.

If you don't mind my asking, how did you make it?

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em3rgent0rdr
I'd like to see (light grey) concentric circles for 10min, 20min, 30min 40min,
50min, that way can more accurately determine the distance.

~~~
Sujan
Shouldn't be too hard I think.

Right now r = 30 min, so just use the circle without the label and scale it
down, then add it at the same lines the hour circle is touched:
[https://github.com/nate-
parrott/subway/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93...](https://github.com/nate-
parrott/subway/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=one+hour&type=)

------
1wheel
The NYT made one for commuter rail a few years ago. It is one of my favorite
graphics.

[http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/03/17/nyregion/nyregi...](http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/03/17/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/20070318_TRAIN_GRAPHIC.html)

~~~
24gttghh
Any idea why some trains that are further out have a shorter travel time to
the city than the next closest physical station?

~~~
bgun
Express trains. Certain lines skip many intervening stops to decrease travel
time between major hubs.

~~~
24gttghh
Ah makes sense and I see that in the legend now.

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eric_h
This is awesome and is pretty accurate wrt to average-to-best case scenarios
on trips with and without transfers that I'm familiar with.

Kudos to the author.

~~~
nateparrott
Thanks! Turns out the MTA does keep a pretty detailed schedule (not that they
manage to stick to it much, these days) in the GTFS format, so it's not hard
to compute travel times client-side. As a plus, GTFS seems pretty-widely used,
meaning it shouldn't be so hard to port this to other transit systems!

~~~
jakecopp
Would this method work for GTFS Bus routes?

I'm also keen to port it to Sydney's train network as we have GTFS and GTFS
realtime!

GTFS realtime is a lot of fun, I built a simple JSON real time API for Sydney
buses which could be easily ported to other GTFS realtime feeds:
[https://github.com/jakecoppinger/sydney-bus-
departures](https://github.com/jakecoppinger/sydney-bus-departures)

~~~
nateparrott
It should! As far as I know, GTFS is pretty transport-mode-agnostic. (I
imagine the bus stops are a bit more dense, though — it helps that the NYC map
has a recognizable set of line colors that remain familiar when you jumble it
all up)

~~~
jakecopp
Thanks!

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beobab
Am I the only one who read it as "time travel", and thought it'd be some map
of how it used to be?

~~~
square90
Yeah, I was ready for a subway history lesson.

~~~
csylvanshine
I was expecting a map of the subway for time travelers

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sndean
This reminds of a Washington Post article I saw [0], that made me start
thinking about travel inequality (?), where someone in Podgorica is more or
less cut off from the rest of Europe, while someone in Paris may have an
entirely different experience.

And that's not considering differences in income... even if they have the
money to travel, it's simply more difficult.

[0]
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/06/05...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/06/05/map-
the-remarkable-distances-you-can-travel-on-a-european-train-in-less-than-a-
day/)

~~~
rospaya
It's completely true, but the article only considers trains. Some countries
ignored their train infrastructure, somewhere it's hard or expensive to build
it and Montenegro is both poor and mountainous, making it hard and expensive
to do.

On the other hand, Montenegrins are well covered by cheap flights and most of
the population is within driving distance to an international airport.

------
tvladeck
This is awesome. Sort of similar idea, different approach, definitely doesn't
look as cool, but my team and I published this today:

[http://blog.gradientmetrics.com/2017/12/07/new-york-city-
in-...](http://blog.gradientmetrics.com/2017/12/07/new-york-city-in-
timespace/)

~~~
catbird
A map distorted by a non-spatial metric is often referred to as a "cartogram."
The wikipedia page has a nice list of algorithms for computing different
types, which might give you some inspiration.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram)

~~~
tvladeck
Umm... wow! I did not know this, which shows my level of knowledge in this
field (0). But this is amazing! Thank you!

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forrestthewoods
I wrote a blog post about visualizing commute times. There's a section for New
York in the middle. [https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/visualizing-commute-
times-3...](https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/visualizing-commute-
times-378009330ffa)

There's a tool you can play around with a little bit. Fair warning, it gets
throttled pretty quickly. But source code is available for anyone who wants to
experiment on their own.

------
ryanwaggoner
I love this graphic from the NY Times with travel times for commuter rail in
the greater NYC area:

[http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/03/17/nyregion/nyregi...](http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/03/17/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/20070318_TRAIN_GRAPHIC.html)

------
chx
What makes this even more complicated is walking. 49 Street and 50 Street is
only 4 minutes on foot while 10 minutes on the subway.

~~~
s0rce
Also, a concern in London, if you look at only the tube map you might think
the shortest distance is to take 2 trains since the map isn't to scale,
however, it might only be a few minute walk. To try to help they've published
a map.

[http://content.tfl.gov.uk/walking-tube-
map.pdf](http://content.tfl.gov.uk/walking-tube-map.pdf)

Not sure if there is something similar for NYC.

~~~
chx
Yeah but even that is just same lines and so bits like walking from Chancery
Lane to Farringdon taking eight minutes on foot and "nope" on the tube ;) is
missing.

Or St Paul's to Mansion House, that's just six minutes, even Blackfriars is
only nine.

------
Flux159
I like the idea as its an interesting map visualization of the subway across a
time domain rather than distance.

I'm wondering why there's such a large difference in certain areas between
weekday rush hour and late night though (for instance, clicking on 68th St
Hunter College and changing between weekday rush hour and weekday late night
is making 59th street go from 2 mins away to 12 mins away).

A few notes about mobile (specifically iPhone usage): Its difficult to use on
iPhone because the first tap doesn't seem to do anything to the map - if you
tap again at exactly the right place (on the dot), then it will work on
iPhone. I think I know what the issue with this is: the onclick event is being
replaced with the hover state when you tap once, then the real onclick is
called when you tap on the dot again.

~~~
nateparrott
I'm calculating travel times by simulating a rider starting from the selected
stop at a specific time (for example, "weekday late night" is 3 AM, and "rush
hour" is 8 AM) and "waiting" for he next scheduled train. That's why, when you
select most stops during late night, the nearest stops are pretty far (~ 10
minutes) away — because that's a typical time you'd wait for a train at that
time of night. It's definitely not a perfect prediction.

And yep — I really need to put some work into the mobile experience. I'm
surprised it works at all!

~~~
diziet
To address that issue, a better calculation might be to compute possible wait
times based on distribution of likely arrival times at the station and return
some weighted average.

~~~
nateparrott
The issue with using average waiting times (as opposed to picking a particular
time and computing actual waiting times) is stations with multiple trains —
the N, R and Q might each stop at Union Square once every 10 minutes, but if
you're happy boarding any of those, then your average wait time isn't 5
minutes — it's much less.

What I _might_ try is sampling a couple random start times (e.g. 8:00 AM, 8:03
AM, 8:22 AM) and averaging the predictions of all those.

~~~
jsjohnst
> What I might try is sampling a couple random start times

My gut says this would be a better value, but I don’t have the evidence to
prove it

------
nerfhammer
Tangent, anyone know where there's an altitude/elevation map of the NYC subway
tunnels? Everything I've ever been able to find assumes they're completely 2D.

~~~
cooper12
Hmm, I didn't have any luck finding any myself, nor did these redditors:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/3q1jyk/help_me_find_a_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/3q1jyk/help_me_find_a_depth_map_of_nyc_subway/),
but you might find this to be some interesting trivia:
[https://untappedcities.com/2013/06/26/deepest-highest-
subway...](https://untappedcities.com/2013/06/26/deepest-highest-subway-
stations-nyc/?displayall=true).

------
ionforce
This was so confusing on mobile. I don't think it worked on my iPhone. Totally
different experience on desktop.

~~~
ringaroundthetx
Came here looking for this

I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be seeing

That super marketable “mobile-last” development

------
arnl
I tried making something like that for Paris but it's far from looking as
nice: [https://arnaudl.github.io/metro/](https://arnaudl.github.io/metro/)

------
blt
NUMTOT check-in

~~~
timecube
o7

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wefarrell
Very cool, love seeing the data represented this way. Curious about how it
accounts for transfer times. I suspect with transfers the distances are
actually a bit longer.

~~~
Terretta
From the page:

 _”... when you click a stop, a simulation is run to calculate the travel time
from that stop to every other stop. Using train departure times from the MTA,
and the MTA 's predicted transfer times within stations, the code counts how
many minutes it takes for a simulated passenger departing the selected stop at
8:00 on a weekday would arrive at each stop on the map...”_

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bogomipz
This is really cool.

It would be interesting if there were a way to crowd source the average time
from actual riders and compare them with the the MTA's feed.

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twobyfour
I was excited to check this out, but there seems to be a zoom limit, which
makes this too difficult to try to use on a (small) phone.

~~~
nateparrott
Just pushed some changes to make it a (little) easier to use on a small phone.
Still far from perfect, but a little better!

~~~
twobyfour
Thanks! The larger fonts help. I still can't zoom in far enough to tap a
specific station, unfortunately. Even my tiny fingers cover a half dozen
stations in Manhattan or at least 2-3 in Brooklyn/Queens - so I get a random
selection from nearby stations.

I must be missing something, though, because all it will do is show a station
label when I tap a station. I've tapped several stations but don't see
anything else to interact with. How are you supposed to get it to show travel
times? (Using Safari on iOS 10, if that makes a difference.)

~~~
nateparrott
You need to tap a couple times — the first tap triggers the hover state
(definitely not ideal for mobile). Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to hit the
same stop consistently multiple times...

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morgante
This is really cool, but it seems very overly optimistic when it comes to
routes with connections based on a few pairs I tried.

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cameldrv
Related: [http://mapnificent.net](http://mapnificent.net)

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rcurry
I misread the title and thought it said NYC Subway Time Travel Map. Boy was I
disappointed.

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JepZ
Any body knows if that google_transit.zip is somewhere available for other
towns?

~~~
sellweek
Yeah, you can find GTFS feeds for a lot of cities at
[http://transitfeeds.com/](http://transitfeeds.com/)

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adrianparsons
This is so cool!

I would love more time radii (30 minutes, 15 minutes)!

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yoland68
hmm, okay, WNYC project's version has much better data representation

[https://project.wnyc.org/transit-time/](https://project.wnyc.org/transit-
time/)

~~~
dang
There's no need to be snarky, even when someone else has a better data
representation.

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tophattom
I've been searching for a room in a foreign city since I'm going there for
exchange studies. What I've missed is a map that would highlight an area on
the map that is within a specified travel time using public transit. Some
approximation could be done by picking points on concentric circles and
checking travel times for those places, I imagine. Given that Google Maps
provides an API for public transit directions, I haven't checked.

~~~
prodent
It's been posted by somebody else on the thread already, but do you know
[http://mapnificient.net](http://mapnificient.net)?

