There's an absolute tonne of articles and books praising this form of subway map, but I've seen little to no actual analysis of their benefit other than being w

There's an absolute tonne of articles and books praising this form of subway map, but I've seen little to no actual analysis of their benefit other than being widely adopted (which only proves a trend has caught on, not that it's in any way a benign one). Arguments for their use that I've seen seem to just parrot the original marketing justifications without any novel perspective, nor much revision of those justifications with newer systems in different cities. Anecdotally, they seem a very poor design: they actively discourage multimodal transport and as a result entrench further reliance on expensive subways for everything (don't get me wrong subways are great, but they're incredibly disruptive to build and cities with comprehensive subway networks tend to have extremely poor corresponding overground transit options - in contrast see NLs relatively sparse subways)