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NYC’s new digital subway map
- dang 6y agoAnother good article is https://www.fastcompany.com/90566212/nycs-new-subway-tool-settles-the-biggest-debate-in-maps https://www.fastcompany.com/90566212/nycs-new-subway-tool-se... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24847963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24847963)
- CryptoBanker 6y agoDon't see why this is any better than the existing solutions...
- chrismeller 6y agoWell 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.
- interestica 6y agoDon't forget copyright reasons https://nypost.com/2020/01/09/mta-goes-after-amateur-mapmaker-for-copyright-infringement/ https://nypost.com/2020/01/09/mta-goes-after-amateur-mapmake...
- jcranmer 6y agoIt'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."
- CryptoBanker 6y agoI live in NYC...you can see the exact same info on both the MyMTA app as well as in the Subway Time app. This is nothing new...
- fennecfoxen 6y agoThe 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.
- bobbylarrybobby 6y agoThat'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.
- fennecfoxen 6y agoThat'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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dantheman 6y agoI like it but the trains are too small. It's be b better if they where an arrow showing direction and wwre buffet than the line.
- chrismeller 6y agoI 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).
- interestica 6y agoI didn't realize the trains were actually on the map until your comment. Definitely need something distinct highlight them.
- degenerate 6y agoWhen zoomed out, they should be dots. Zooming in, they should be rectangle but take up more space than the rail so they are more obvious.
- shmerl 6y agoTrains are hard to notice because they blend with the color of the line too much. But the idea of the dynamic map is neat.
- blintz 6y agohttps://map.mta.info/ https://map.mta.info/ if you want to actually see the new map.
- TrackerFF 6y agoDunno if it's just me, but that website is more sluggish than flightradar24, which has hundreds of moving data-points on its map. What gives
- monkpit 6y agoProbably has something to do with the fact that every movement is pushed to the browser history. Try pushing back button after you have moved the map a little.
- untog 6y agoI 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.
- monkpit 6y agoI meant “something to do” as in it’s symptomatic of some repeated operation - not the direct cause.
- SahAssar 6y agoSince 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.
- bontaq 6y agoAlmost unusably slow in firefox on a decent macbook pro, it looks nice though.
- ebg13 6y agoMap 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. This is not good.
- yogurtbuddy 6y agoArticle on why it sucks: https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/2020/10/worst-map-ever/ https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/2020/10/worst-map-e... > 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.
- colmvp 6y ago> 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. Wow, he's so modest.
- Whitespace 6y agoI am surprised to see POST requests to https://example.com/ https://example.com/ in uMatrix and the Network Inspector. Can anyone share why this is happening?
- OJFord 6y agoI noticed that too, probably just something like a copy-pasted 'how to make a request with this framework' left in accidentally.
- ebg13 6y agoGiven 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. :\
- oh_sigh 6y agoIt 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. loadFutureServiceStatus.ts export const FUTURE_SERVICE_STATUS_ENDPOINT = 'https://example.com'; https://example.com'; ....later on... const serviceStatusFuture: SoapServiceStatus = await fetch( FUTURE_SERVICE_STATUS_ENDPOINT,...
- OJFord 6y agoMaybe I'm just biased by what I'm used to, (London) but the true-to-geography topography seems to me to make this way harder to read. Compare: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/large-print-tube-map.pdf http://content.tfl.gov.uk/large-print-tube-map.pdf
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoHow? 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
- OJFord 6y agoMaybe 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.)
- ghaff 6y agoMuch 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.
- MisterTea 6y ago> Maybe I'm just biased 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.
- mr-ron 6y agoHeres a great article about this exact topic. 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. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/arts/design/the-subway-map-that-rattled-new-yorkers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/arts/design/the-subway-ma...
- MisterTea 6y agoI don't know if its just me but this loads abysmally slow in Firefox 81 on Linux Mint. I do not have chrome installed so I cant test on that browser.
- marcinzm 6y agoThe map feels like wading through molasses in Chrome for me. It's usable but just barely.
- stevepike 6y agoExtremely 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/ https://example.com/' from origin 'https://map.mta.info 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."
- ape4 6y agoEmbarrassing.
- richardhawthorn 6y agoThe 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. [0] https://www.traintrackr.io https://www.traintrackr.io
- lhball 6y agoPretty, but performance is abysmal. 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.
- fennecfoxen 6y agoIt'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?
- antihero 6y agoIt is almost unusably slow on Safari on an 2019 i7 MacBook Pro.
- gibolt 6y agoProbably updates center and zoom, to make it shareable.
- untog 6y ago> 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.
- neatze 6y agoTo me, this map is less readable then the old one (you can't see all the stations), it's like it was made to look nice, but not usable.
- carterklein13 6y agoI'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"
- RoutinePlayer 6y agocouldn't agree with you more
- zxcvbn4038 6y agoOr 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. ;)
- carterklein13 6y agoI 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.
- cwhiz 6y agoThey 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.
- aj7 6y agoPans,resizes slower than s___.
- justinc8687 6y agoAs 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.
- c54 6y agoWould love to see the public APIs backing this site so that someone could reimplement the map more performantly
- aimor 6y agoSome other live subway maps: New York City: https://map.mta.info/ https://map.mta.info/ Washington DC: https://gis.wmata.com/metrotrain/index.html https://gis.wmata.com/metrotrain/index.html Chicago: https://www.transitchicago.com/traintrackermap/ https://www.transitchicago.com/traintrackermap/ Boston: https://www.mbta.com/schedules/Blue/line https://www.mbta.com/schedules/Blue/line I'd like to see more, but that's about all I could find from cities themselves.
- lqet 6y agoThere is https://tracker.geops.de/ https://tracker.geops.de/, which integrates most of them (though not always with realtime data).
- kuanbutts 6y agofwiw I find the others (DC, Chi, BOS) easier to view/pan/explore
- ElijahLynn 6y agoNew York City: https://map.mta.info/ https://map.mta.info/ is the new live map being discussed.
- leonk 6y agoTwo I've found interesting... Tokyo: https://minitokyo3d.com/ https://minitokyo3d.com/ India (not a subway, but the scale here makes it fascinating): https://railradar.railyatri.in/ https://railradar.railyatri.in/ 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 http://wgallia.com/#!underground
- systemvoltage 6y agoThis 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?
- morley 6y agoAre we looking at the same map? When I click on a station, I see a list of trains with their ETA, in minutes, next to them.
- kuanbutts 6y agoI 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.
- SeanLuke 6y agoSlow beyond belief, sparse, and difficult for me to navigate changes. :-( A lot of work still needs to be done on this.
- supernova87a 6y agoI 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? [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-dont-we-know-where-all-the-trains-are/415152/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-d...
- asah 6y agoplease no. 1. very slow, even on FiOS 2. super ugly - example: https://photos.app.goo.gl/C8h8d39AeNrmEuMx5 https://photos.app.goo.gl/C8h8d39AeNrmEuMx5
- ElijahLynn 6y agoThere is a mini-documentary title, The Map, linked to in the article that is about this whole project, enjoy > https://vimeo.com/470020599/74757d3b17 https://vimeo.com/470020599/74757d3b17. > "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
- spcebar 6y agoIs this a postlight creation? Heard them talking about something with the MTA on their podcast.
- bigwheeler 6y agoPage load literally crashes safari on iPad Pro running iOS 13.5. I don’t even get to see it so I can complain how slow and janky it is.
- aerovistae 6y agoIs there an app version of this? Couldn't find one.
- gerbler 6y agoIt's crazy that this was done pro-bono. Perhaps this is why there are a lot of performance issues?
- BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y agoThis page took like 30 seconds to open ... and I have a fast computer and fast internet.
- plondon514 6y ago> Today, the MTA is unveiling its new digital map, the first one that uses the agency’s own data streams to update in real time So they have a new data stream and _are not_ using the already provided GTFS stream from the MTA?* *https://transitfeeds.com/p/mta https://transitfeeds.com/p/mta