I'd be curious to hear what someone who is just visiting NYC would think of something like this. From my experience, once tourists enter a subway station, all bets are off in terms of orienting yourself. I feel like the little LED indicators in most stations at least in Manhattan with the line and time-to-arrival is really all you need.
Or, instead of investing in a virtual map, invest in better speakers in the actual trains themselves so that people can actually hear "now arriving at 14th St Union Square next stop Astor" instead of "now arcshcshcshcsh Uniocshcsh next cshop cshcshcsh"
They need to just add the digital information screens to all the train lines. It's significantly better than relying on speakers.
As for helping people orient themselves in the station... I have no idea. Using an app is the only way for tourists to figure out which direction to go. You have to know the terminal station to know which direction a train is going. The apps will (usually) tell you that. Having digital information inside the train would at least make people more immediately aware that they are on the wrong train.
My most common problem in the stations, and the cheapest and easiest one to solve is this: when I get off a train and am about to go above ground, I have no idea what direction I am facing.
The signs for which exit is which say the street corners or maybe just the streets, or maybe neither, but if I'm going to a new area, I have no idea what those streets are or which directions they go. So I would usually just have to stand above ground for a while and look at the business names, and look at the map on my phone, and look for the street signs, and eventually figure out which direction I needed to walk.
The solution is simple: paint a compass on the floor near the exits.
Depends on the borough and the line. My experience is mostly in Manhattan, where subways run (more or less) north/south, or as the MTA calls it uptown/downtown.
In those situations it's very simple to orient yourself from the train.
E.g. I'm going from 42nd street downtown to Astor Place on the IRT Lexington Ave Line (aka the 4 5 6). I get off at Astor Place and I immediately know north/south nee uptown/downtown. The train was heading south! I just need to remember that orientation as I ascend. And because it's a simpler station, it's easy to maintain that orientation as you leave the station.
stand above ground for a while
Yes it can sometimes be very confusing when exiting. They need much clearer indications at every exit. The natives who have been taking the same route for years have no problems, but the tourists can easily get confused.
The solution is simple: paint a compass on the floor near the exits.
This isn't quite so simple. I grew up in Manhattan (many years ago). For the longest time I thought that Manhattan was north/south. Certainly every subway map showed it that way. But it's not. Look at a Google map. Manhattan appears tilted about 20 degrees or so from true north.
The problem would be much worse in other boroughs. Some streets in Brooklyn or Queens are at about 45 degrees from the "cardinal directions" of N E S W. I think compass drawings offset so much from the actual street directions could be very confusing.
I think the newer phones are making this problem easier. Apple seems to have gone out of its way recently to emphasize that its phone is now better at discerning which way it's pointing.
An arrow <-- uptown downtown --> could work in most spots. Or an accurate compass that is tilted 20 degrees from the actual streets, still helpful. Or:
It's been a long time since I was in NYC but here in DC they have huge signs visible from the platform and maps everywhere along with lists of stops for each colored train that stops at the platform. I'm not sure how you can improve on that.
On a packed train you won't be able to see the one screen in the car. You might not even be able to turn your body to orient to one right behind your head. Speakers are a must.
Turn the entire ceiling of the car into a video display. I'm somewhat joking but based on the mockups of windowless passenger airplanes, maybe something appropriate for the subway could be developed.
Yeah, I grew up in NYC and never had any idea what they were saying in the station or on the train. Over-driven mics, underpowered amps and tiny speakers == total harmonic distortion exceeding intelligibility thresholds...
I really don't understand why NYC doesn't have N/S/E/W indicators engraved into the ground at every exit. It would really help to orient yourself when you exit a station.
And before some smart-ass says it, it doesn't help that Avenues and Streets are perpendicular because that still doesn't tell N from S, or E from W. I always end up walking a block in the wrong direction just to orient myself.
Or the LED signs that tend to installed behind other equipment that obscures their viewing - which I am convinced is someone's scheme to get paid twice by having to move it again later. I'm not convinced that the signs have real time data, it often seems more like if the schedule was running perfectly there will be a train here in N minutes. I see things show up early all the time, occasionally the train don't show up at all but get dropped off sign.
It is interesting that somehow the conductors manage to get the marbles out of their mouth only for screaming at people for holding the doors open. I stick my foot in the door every time they do that - negative reinforcement. ;)
I thought it was just me that can never get the right god damn angle to see those signs! I swear the ones at Union Square I feel like a gymnast trying to just see how far away the next train is. Knowing the MTA, I'd guess your conspiracy is definitely at least partially true.
Indeed. Or they could simply use all of those LED displays that they installed above the subway entrances to show real time information about service changes and train arrivals instead of using them to show advertising.[1][2]
Signs on platforms in NYC are just intentionally obtuse. All the signs on the platforms themselves reference the end of the line bu street name, which nobody knows. Some places name a borough, which is what everyone actually wants to know, but is only ever on the mezzanine levels.
i hate using NYC subway. it is rarely.clear which train im getting on and where im going compared to say london, where i always know, very clearly. nyc assumes i know all the boroughs and train numbers while london shows you a huge map per train with where youre going.
There's a station in London called "Cockfosters". I was once on a train with a malfunctioning announcement system that proudly announced "This is a Piccadilly line train to Cock" at every stop.
I doubt it has anything to do with that at all, that's not a performance intensive operation at all. Rendering a map, however, can be very performance intensive when done the wrong way, as I suspect it is being here.
Since each pushState also creates a object reference that cannot be garbage collected as normal (every pushState includes a object to be passed to a popstate event) I don't think it's too wild to suspect slowdowns to be caused by them using pushState instead of replaceState.
It could of course be thousands of other things too (and in combination), but it's not a bad place to start.
It's slow for me, on a 32 core Threadripper with a Titan RTX ;)
I usually don't notice slow websites, but it's noticeably blurry as I pan it around because it can't update at the 165Hz refresh rate of my monitor. Reminds me of gaming in 60Hz again.
I looked into it a little more. It switches into night mode when it gets dark out (or they pushed an update), and the performance is much better. My subjective impression was that it was usually getting a decent framerate when panning, but with some stuttering. I took a profile of it in Chrome, and that's what's going on. A lot of the time, it will run at 120-130Hz, but drop down to 50Hz for no real reason. (They sleep a bit between frames, they aren't just maxing out the CPU. Probably tested on a 60Hz monitor, and they don't play enough games to be able to pick out the drops to 50Hz. And I guess they didn't use the profiler, or look at the fps profile that's provided.)
They are doing some weird things. The Javascript console is littered with CORS warnings -- for making a cross-origin request to example.com every time a map tile needs to be loaded. That is probably an accident. They also seem to make HTTP requests for the map tiles whenever they enter the screen; they appears to be no caching whatsoever. (Maybe that's the right approach. The tiles do end up being served from the browser's cache. The network inspector claims they take about 1ms to load, which is probably slower than a lookup in a data structure in the Javascript program... but I didn't test it and I don't really trust that a "1ms" in there means "we timed it and it was exactly 1ms". It probably means "0 < time < 1", which could be anything.) Finally, they are serving this all out of what appears to be Azure blob storage; it's HTTP/1.1 so I guess we are opening a new TCP connection each time a tile needs to be loaded.
My TL;DR is I don't really do frontend stuff or performance stuff, but the site seemed especially slow. I bet they could clean it up in a few hours, so probably will.
They're definitely being made, just blocked by CORS. Firefox shows that 52 OPTIONS requests were made, which failed, so it blocked their corresponding POSTs.
Also looks like it changes the browser history on every interaction, ie any drag and drop, which seems, to me, to indicate some behind the scenes UUID tracking.
There’s a pretty awkward moment in the expensive-looking documentary video (ie uncritical puff piece) by Gary Hustwit[1], where a developer on the project says “we can’t have it be like chunky 10 frames per second, you know?”, in the exact moment we see an FPS counter on his computer slow down to 14 FPS as he pans around.
Was the whole point of this site to make the cars more visible on the map? B/c they're super hard to see! Would've been so much easier to just use a regular Leaflet slippy map or something and just drop an icon for each car... Could've done that in a day. Sigh.
You're right. It's really silly isn't it. They have a known set of vector shapes, on a quite small portion of a map, with limited geometry. Trains travel along those lines, and really there is not much going on an at all. I don't understand how performance and the technical challenges are so bad for such a limited scope render.
> seems, to me, to indicate some behind the scenes UUID tracking.
I don't know why. It's updating the URL so that if you copy and paste it'll show the receiver the same view you have as the sender. They just need to be using history.replaceState to do that, rather than history.pushState.
It's also not very good when you're zoomed out; everything is way too skinny.
And what is the sloppiness with the lines at DeKalb? Why is the out-of-service shading for the DNR under 4th Avenue this weekend so halfhearted? It's particularly hard to tell when the lines are skinny. I guess they were thinking of how good it was for Manhattan?
So tell me: when I click on tonight's map, what am I supposed to make of a one-way train service on the W, between Whitehall (where it usually stops) and 86th (which is not part of its usual route)? Is that actually a real thing? I am especially confused given that the more-information click takes me to a "look up service changes by line" page that doesn't show anything when I ask for service changes on the W.
And if the D train tonight is running northbound on 6th Avenue and southbound on 8th Avenue, why is the only unusual color displayed on 8th Avenue, given that people who catch the D expect it on its usual route under 6th Avenue?
I guess there's no hope for the F-diamond train but that probably doesn't matter much; I'm not sure it's even running post-pandemic...
This gets worse the more you look at it. A project manager wanted shininess, and they have it, but geez, can't anyone actually try to use the thing before showering it with praise?
It looks like they have code waiting for a different endpoint for fetching service status, but instead of just disabling it when not using it, they changed the queried endpoint to example.com and still execute it.
Given how unusable the site is in Safari and Firefox on macOS, probably because it was written by someone who should not have been tasked with writing it. :\
I haven't found one for London (my hometown), but there is this interesting animation project that uses historical data to demonstrate passenger flow on the system. http://wgallia.com/#!underground
> What is the purpose of having a geographic map base when the subway diagram isn’t going to adhere to it? It’s obvious the coders started with station GIS data and tried to have a computer draw the connecting lines. Google used to do this and things just looked wrong with lines traveling to places they never actually went. Eventually they aligned their lines to their proper course.
> Many online are praising the map and I totally understand that there are people out there who have no idea what my problem with it is. It’s ok, I’m overly educated.
I was looking at the sourcemap and it appears that they wrote their own tiling library (see Tiles.ts and related files under js/). Is this right? Why not just Leaflet since they're rendering PNG tiles? Or Mapbox?
The whole thing feels a bit over-engineered to me at first glance.
Map performance is nightmarishly bad on my 2017 15" MBP. Dragging the map ranges from completely unusable in Safari 14 to janky as shit in Firefox 82 to mediocre but at least functional in Chrome 86.
The log is filled with CORS violations and requests to example.com.
I feel like the geographical features of New York matter more here than they do in London. At least when I’ve visited London, I’ve gotten by with just thinking of it as a big piece of land with a (thin) river running through it.
But the water in New York City separates the boroughs a lot more than the Thames does to London. You can’t easily walk across the Hudson or East River, even if you’re near a bridge. Central Park matters too. So it’s not something than should just be abstracted away.
In short, because NYC is denser than London with more happening above ground, it was more helpful to see exactly where the stops were going to let you out, vs being easier to read.
As a life long NYer: yes, you are. NYC subway map has looked like this for pretty much its entire existence. They tried flattening it recently to "modernize" it and it was universally panned.
I find this type of map to be completely unusable until you know precisely which stations you are going to enter and exit. If I am a tourist in London and I'm somewhere near Hyde Park, I would find this mapper to be an utter waste. Without Google Maps I would be completely lost.
How? Topographical maps let me know exactly where to start looking for a stop without having to read anything versus having a mind map of the tube and needing to scan names
Maybe the stop density is different, but I just don't find that an issue, you'd have to be outside of zones 1-3 to have to walk more than say 5-10min in any direction to hit a tube station. (That'd be interesting actually: heat map of how far away nearest station is from any given point.)
Flip side is my knowledge of London geography is pretty appalling. (Relative to say where I grew up, not necessarily to other people. The range of local geographical knowledge is probably worse here than in NYC.)
Much of Manhattan is a grid so just a little bit of knowledge about what the non-numeric avenues are, the streets that bound Central Park, etc. are pretty much all the knowledge you need between about the Village and Harlem.
This map doesn't bring anything new except for knowing when the next train will arrive. It does a poor job at that... the user has to guess when the train will arrive.
This is completely missing the point. No one cares where the train is. They care when it will arrive. Whether it is in a bend, it is waiting or whatever is totally irrelevant.
You need 2 things:
1) A map, whether digital or printed.
2) ETA time.
Why are they spending all this time and energy for something that is useless and unnecessary?
Extremely slow for me as well (with a fast machine) on Arch linux in both firefox and chrome.
Getting about a million "Access to fetch at 'https://example.com/' from origin 'https://map.mta.info' has been blocked by CORS policy: Response to preflight request doesn't pass access control check: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. If an opaque response serves your needs, set the request's mode to 'no-cors' to fetch the resource with CORS disabled."
> "The Map" (Work & Co x Gary Hustwit, 2020) is a short documentary about a revolutionary redesign of New York City's iconic subway map. Filmmaker Gary Hustwit documents the process as digital agency Work & Co creates a new "live map" — one that updates in real-time — to help New Yorkers and tourists better plan their journeys. The film examines the evolution of wayfinding and user interfaces, and shows how good design and the latest digital technology can simplify one of the world's most complex transit systems. Featuring Felipe Memoria, Rachel Haot, Sarah Meyer, Joshua Gee, Marcela Abbade, Karina Sirqueira, Robert Penner, and Mohan Ramaswamy
The MTA have been behind other rapid transit networks when it comes to making their data available. You can get arrival prediction information on all stops/lines now through their API, but that wasn't the case until recently. They are still behind the Boston MBTA, where you can get vehicle locations in addition to arrival predictions, and TFL (London Underground) where they have a very well thought out API.
We use all these APIs to power our Traintrackr boards[0], processing the predicted arrival data (or departure data if they only provide that) to show trains moving through the network.
However, these three APIs are all better than the BART API, which seems to change occasionally.
I remember the huge article a few years ago on why train counters/timers were not possible in the NYC subway because of the lack of ATC/PTC, and the entire system was still pretty much mechanical relay switched and zoned occupancy. [1]
Has something changed? Do trains now have transponders or something?
As a native Staten Islander, I love that this map is actually drawn to scale. While I understand the arguments for the previous iterations focusing on train density, it is nice to see, for the first time in my life, that you can actually see that SI is over 3x the size of Manhattan by land area.
I think it’s much more clear which direction they were headed if you’ve ever used the MTA. The primary directions are uptown and downtown. Up on the right, down on the left (like you would drive a car).
Well if you read the article you would know. It’s because NYC has infamously never had anything like this.
Technical reasons, logistical reasons, integration (it’s actually like 4 systems combined) reasons... It’s not revolutionary in and of itself, just that New York now has one.
It's three systems but more like two. The IRT and the BMT were the original systems and operated on different loading gauges. The city then built the IND system before acquiring the IRT and BMT and consolidating them into one system. The IND system itself is built to the same loading gauge as the BMT, so that the BMT and IND are interchangeable for operational purposes, but the IRT is not interchangeable. The remnants of this is seen in the line names: the numbers are the IRT lines, and the letters are BMT or IND lines.
Note that while the loading gauges are different, other operational aspects (such as signalling and traction power) are the same. So the delay in getting this information up is less a factor of "there's multiple systems" and more "the MTA can't/won't modernize its systems to get this information."
The new thing is that when the F is running down Broadway instead of 6th Ave, it shows an orange line down Broadway instead of down 6th Ave. This is good for some of the extreme service change weekends, the kind where they move the F to the Q and then turn it into a D in Brooklyn so they can run the D on the F in Brooklyn and the A in Manhattan so nobody's running anything at all on Sixth Avenue and they can do all the work they need there. Or when the southbound 5 turns around at Bowling Green and runs northbound on the 1 and 2 so that they can work on a specific switch in the old South Ferry Loop.
But even when it shows this to be the case, it does a very poor job of exposing the specific form of the deviance from normal.
That's actually a really bad change. Color indicates the stops a train will be making. If a train will be going down Broadway then it should be colored the Broadway line color. No one actually cares about the label of a given train; what matters is which stops it will be making, which is dictated by which track it's traveling on.
That's a bit tricky too; the color will no longer match what you see on the train itself; nor will it be reflected at the stations outside of Lower Manhattan where you might catch that train.
Or, instead of investing in a virtual map, invest in better speakers in the actual trains themselves so that people can actually hear "now arriving at 14th St Union Square next stop Astor" instead of "now arcshcshcshcsh Uniocshcsh next cshop cshcshcsh"