A glimpse at the Queens bus map shows intricate lines in overlapping colors but little usable information.
An article in last week’s Queens Courier made me laugh. “Queens Buses Lack Helpful Maps,” the headline read. Of course, Queens buses aren’t the only surface vehicles suffering from a map deficit. Have you ever tried to use an MTA bus map?
The article itself covers some familiar territory. The maps are hard to read; drivers don’t announce enough stops or connecting services; and bus arrival times are a mystery. Take a read right here. The big news seems to be that the MTA is hoping to beef up the information offering on buses. Says The Courier:
Traveling on MTA buses in Queens is dizzying for even the most experienced commuters – let alone the every day New Yorker. On most Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) buses, the only route indicator is a map located directly behind the driver’s seat.
The red, green and blue lines that wind and swerve across the borough’s bus map look like a board game gone terribly wrong. For most bus riders, the map is the only way to navigate neighborhoods unknown to them, and the over 100 lines that operate throughout Queens further complicate their commutes…In compliance with the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), the MTA requires bus drivers to announce bus stops at “transfer points, major intersections and terminal arrivals, as well as any stop requested by a customer,” said Charles Seaton, an MTA spokesperson.
In many cases, there are vandalized and torn maps or no map at all. Buses also lack route identification, providing riders with little to no assistance in planning their trips…According to Seaton, the authority has plans for audio and visual improvements, which will follow the MTA protocol for bus stop announcements. Riders can also use their phones to find directions from online services such as Google Maps and Hopstop.com.
The problem is one of familiarity. Those who know the Queens bus system, for instance, can use the map to supplement their own knowledge. A quick glance will reveal approximately where various routes intersect with each other and where they provide connections to nearby subways.
Problems arise, however, for those who aren’t regular users well versed in the ways of the map. The current MTA bus maps make planning a trip on the fly awfully difficult. Stops aren’t delineated, and frequencies are nowhere to be found. While the MTA has relied on apps to fill the information gap, those riders without the ability to check their phones will be left guessing or waiting if they don’t opt to drive instead.
Personally, I know these pains quite well. I’m very familiar with buses in Manhattan as my parents allowed me to take buses long before I could take the subway on my own, and I have a working familiarity with some Brooklyn bus routes. But if I’m going somewhere new and considering the bus, I’ll have to meticulously plan the route ahead of time or use my phone while out. The current maps, in their PDF or physical form, are a mess of contrasting colors, overlapping route lines and bare outlines
Better solutions are out there. Cap’n Transit has explored the idea of frequency maps for bus service, and others have taken a stab at streamlining the visual presentation. Yet when the MTA overhauls its maps, the subway diagram gets some cosmetic upgrades while the bus maps are left to their own confusing devices. As one rider — Matt Klopfer of Glendale — said to the Queens Courier, “It is very difficult to figure out where you’re going, when to get off and whether you’ve passed your stop or not once you’re on the bus. You need a magnifying glass and a college degree to both read and understand the map that is provided on the bus.”
43 comments
As visitor to New York the past few summers, I will mention my primary problem with MTA bus maps- they’re damned near impossible to find. You can find the iconic NYC subway map everywhere you look in the city, but I have only ever seen one printed MTA bus map that wasn’t fixed to the inside of a bus. It was a map of Staten Island bus routes. The bus I found it on was in Brooklyn.
Manhattan bus maps are relatively easy to find; surprisingly many people I know (about 3, none of whom is a railfan) have them posted in their apartments together with a subway maps.
Bus maps are usually available in subway stations. Ask at the booth.
You can always get bus maps at MTA Headquarters: 347 Madison Avenue. As you walk in, there is a rack with maps immediately to your left.
Also, the Transit Museum stores at Grand Central and at Court St. usually have bus maps (90% of the time).
+ 3 Stone Street (corner of Whitehall Street), MTA’s customer service center.
From there, one of the maps I picked up was a subway-only map “for customers with disabilities.” My review of that map is meh, but if you don’t like the balloon blow-outs on the regular map, this map has less clutter because the bus connection info is on the back.
Ben, if you want to see what I have to deal with, here is the Providence bus map. Forget frequency mapping; how about a way to reliably follow each bus line on the map so that I know where it goes?
Wow I just looked at that. That’s atrocious. Around the federal building it looks like any bus that is represented by red is in fact going to circle every block.
What are you complaining about? NJ Transit DOESNT EVEN PUBLISH A BUS MAP!!!!!
At least you guys have a map. NJT doesn’t have a bus map at all.
Agreed. SEPTA doesn’t (as far as I know) have a system-wide bus map either. It drives me crazy.
I’ve sometimes thought, in my more conspiratorial moments, that NJ Transit doesn’t publish a system-wide bus map because they don’t want people taking the local buses any distance that they could on rail (although they do have zones, which again are difficult to figure out unless you’re a regular commuter along the route). But I’m not sure they want people to know that you can just take a local bus from Newark Penn to the airport for ~$2 and change instead of paying the egregious fare on rail and AirTrain. Those buses are really just supposed to be for the more low-paid airport employees.
And that’s not even considering that New Jersey is still full of other private bus operators that serve a ton of riders but aren’t a part of NJ Transit. You could have no idea that a better service exists in an area from another provider. MTA’s bus maps are comparatively simple and straight-forward. Trace your route on the map, check the schedule, swipe your MetroCard.
I’m not sure I understand the complaint. It’s a complex bus network, so the map is going to look complex. Compare to London, Paris, Berlin – any better? I think ours is a lot easier to follow.
Indicating stops and frequencies on the map itself would only increase the complexity that you decry.
And that’s aside from the fact that frequencies vary by time of day and day of week. One route may have a very heavy peak, running every 3 minutes during rush hours but only every 30 on weekends. Another may run consistently every 15 minutes most of the day, weekdays and weekends alike. Which would you map show as more frequent?
The back of the map does have detailed frequency information, broken down by time of day and day of week. Yes, you have to flip the map over (or open a different PDF), but you can find a lot more information without all the extra clutter on the map.
As for stops, those should be shown on the timetable strip maps. They aren’t, and that’s a problem. But bus stop spacing is normally short enough that you can walk to the street the bus runs on and see the closest bus stop. (Limited stops are shown.) So it’s not the end of the world.
The buses all have bins to hold bus maps. Looks like the MTA no longer considers it a priority to keep them well stocked.
I think the bus maps do a relatively good job. People will never be satisfied. It is a bit unrealistic to expect a borough map to be able to show details like bus stops. You can only makevthe Queens map clearer by breaking it up into three maps with a lot of overlap– Long Island City, Jamaica and Flushing.
The maps would also be clearer if some of the routes were not needlessly complex.
The MTA customer service department is very responsive – a simple phone call is all that’s needed to receive bus maps and schedules. On the paper bus maps, route frequencies are printed on the reverse side.
Not sure about Queens, since I don’t go there too often, but I have found the Manhattan and Bronx bus maps to be perfectly usable. In PDF form, anyway – being able to zoom in and out is necessary. Almost all routes run frequently enough (more frequently than any other city I’ve been to, save Singapore) that I don’t think it’s necessary to encode the frequency on the map. Whether a route is local, limited, express or SBS is useful information, and it is encoded on the map.
If I have any complaint about the bus service here, it is that there are too many stops – all the local routes stop either every block, or every other block. So I have no idea why you would need the stops marked on the map.
SEPTA sold transit maps for $2.50 at one time.
Why the MTA’s busses don’t anounce stops automaticly is beyond me. NJT’s newest bus fleet had AVS preinstalled while the existing fleet is being retrofitted. It’s the same Long Island furm that had AVS systems on the M16 & M34, but were turned off.
Clever devices.
I purchased 2 SEPTA transit maps (Philadelphia City and Suburban) about 10 years ago at about $5 or $6 each at SEPTA’s transit store at their headquarters on Market Street. They have a larger folded width than the MTA maps and the paper stock is nice and thick. Now each of them costs $8.30. They also had a free placemat-style map of Center City when I visited Market East station in around 2005.
Buses being silent is better. Robot recordings day after day drive me crazy. 99% of people on the bus know where they are going. The other 1 % can look out the window like I do when on a new to me bus route.
I have yet to see a huge problem with any of the city’s bus maps. The worst part is there’s a lot of information, and sometimes it takes time to wade through.
There needs to be a systematic approach to this with several kinds of maps and wayshowing and announcements/dispalys. (Preferably LED displays in all buses these do not have to be GPS enabled. Systems outside of NY have had LED displays long before they bus tracking systems.) There needs to be an approach from micro … where is this bus going? what stop is next? … up to system wide. This is not difficult to handle and there are great examples in more bus dependent cities like SF and DC on how to make this work.
I think that the MTA should take a clue from the CTA in chicago. I used to take the buses there frequently when I lived there. They employ an electronic stop announcement system (much like the newer subway cars). I have attempted the bus in queens once to get to Brooklyn so I would not have to go through Manhattan and it was a nightmare.
Chicago, San Francisco, DC. It’s been like that for these cities for at least a decade. (And required by ADA laws believe. And most of these were retrofitted into existing buses.) There’s just no excuse. (Perhaps a lawsuit would push them?
At least now we have Google Transit.
SEPTA, NJT and MTA bus routes and schedules are all in there.
You have to thank each of those systems, since they provide the GTFS feeds that Google Transit uses. But beware, not all the systems that offer GTFS provide all bus stops, i.e. Bee-Line and MTA Bus Company. Suffolk County Transit is probably the largest remaining operator in the NYC area that has yet to offer GTFS.
The map is an obsolete concept, except as art. Routing software from Google and others tells you how to get places on public transit. Not everyone has it yet, but in five years it will be nearly ubiquitous.
On the contrary: routing software really sucks at telling you frequencies, making frequent network maps even more important.
Can you kindly remind me again, what is the frequency threshold you would like to see in such maps? I remember you created a post somewhere about designing frequent network maps some time ago.
It depends on the city, really. The maps I created for New York include buses with at least 10-minute midday off-peak service, because New York City buses are that frequent. The Portland map used to be 15-minute off-peak, but is now down to 15-minute peak because of recent service cuts. And in Providence there isn’t a single route with better than 11-minute frequency at the peak, so the standard should be 20.
If you want to read more, head over to Human Transit and read the posts in the Frequent Network category.
I don’t need to know frequencies. I simply know that I want to get from point A to point B as fast as possible, at some time that may be right now or may be in the future. And the software works perfectly for that.
Why do you think people need to know frequencies?
Software bases its decisions on bus and train schedules.
But if the bus or train isn’t running precisely on schedule, or you are not running on precisely the same schedule that you asked the software for, there may be a better way to reach your destination.
If you have two options, one more frequent than the other, you’re better off using the more frequent option (all else being equal). Say one street has a bus line that runs every 30 minutes, arriving at your stop on the :12 and :42. Two blocks over is another bus line that runs every 5 minutes, on the :x0 and :x5. Your origin and destination are a 3-minute walk from either of the two routes, and the running time is the same. If you ask the software for a trip starting at 8:08, it will send you to the less frequent bus, since you’ll get to the bus stop at 8:11 and the bus will pull up at 8:12. But what happens if you leave a minute or two late, or you walk just a bit slower than the software assumes (maybe you had to stop to tie your shoelace), or the bus is running a minute or two early? Then you miss the bus and have to wait a half hour for the next one. But if you went by frequency, you’d walk to the other bus (regardless of the exact time), because the time penalty for missing a bus is much shorter.
Also: I asked a software program for directions today that involved going from Grand Central to Union Square. The software told me to take the 4 train. But a 5 train came first. Fortunately, I know how to read a map, so I took the 5 train.
Oops. Colon-zero was parsed as a smiley.
There is a cool new tool that would be a nice addition for a resident or a visitor to the city. Its a virtual NYC Map called City Maps that has information about ever business in the city. Not sure how condusive it is to the bus system, but would be a great help to get around the city.
The paper map has a frequency schedule for every line on the flip side, like this:
http://mta.info/nyct/maps/busqns2.pdf
It’s not posted on the bus, but it’s a lot of information to convey; where would you find room?
What’s so bad about the map? Just find where you are at and where you need to go and find the lines that connect the two and their associated bus numbers? You don’t need a college degree to figure that out (I’ve been using the bus maps since I was 10)
I have to agree with the people here saying that the map isn’t all that bad. Sure it was a little daunting the first time I looked at it, but I don’t think there will ever be one map that makes something as big as a borough easy to read, unless it’s an 8 foot by 8 foot poster. And the maps need to show routes on the actual roads, not general approximations.
My only complaint with the bus service as it is (knowing GPS is eventually coming) is that at night it is extremely hard to figure out where you are if the driver doesn’t make a clear announcement. Without using GPS on Google maps on my cell phone, I’d be screwed on getting off where I need to. Then again if I sat in the front where it’s darker I could see out the front window, but in the back, it’s near impossible.
Agree about the maps. I don’t think they are that bad.
We are totally behind on announcements. Even before GPS I rode several bus systems in Europe as far back as the early 90s that had this automated (later also visually). I assume it was based on odometer distance.
Look out the window. Your GPS will tell you to turn left at the light, and you will drive down railroad tracks instead of the road along the railroad tracks. How will you get to the police or home if your GPS device/phone is mugged or out of battery?
Too many announcements are irritating.
If you’re afraid you won’t recognize your stop, ask the driver when you get on to announce it.
“The maps would also be clearer if some of the routes were not needlessly complex.”
I think Brooklyn Bus has it right. I can’t think of any way to present the maps better graphically, and in fact the Manhattan map, where the routes are relatively straightforward, are not bad.
Its just that there is no way to present a system where the bus routes seem to have been drawn by a five year old with a crayon, and where they tend to stop every other block and run on different frequencies even if they are running on schedule, in a non-complex way. And you can’t have a straightforward bus system in Queens anyway because the street layout is not straightforward.
Add to the problem: The MTA has refused to install bus schedules at bus stops on the routes they purchased from private carriers over 10 years ago, such as the Q18 and Q65. You never know when those buses are coming, unless you ride them every day.
It’s not “The MTA.” It’s MTA Bus, which is a distinct entity from MTA New York City Transit. I don’t know why MTA Bus has never posted Guide-a-Rides – it’s probably a simple funding issue. New York City Transit has its own funding for GAR’s.
Although there’s nothing posted at the bus stops, there are printed timetables, which are also on the MTA website. So you can look up the schedules in advance or on a smartphone. (Obviously, that isn’t very useful for an unplanned trip if you don’t have a smartphone.)
And the takeovers took place in 2005 and 2006 – not “over 10 years ago.”
You can nitpick about when the takeovers took place. The point is, why haven’t the schedules been posted, 6 years out? Not everyone can afford a smartphone.
While I London I was really impressed with the local bus maps posted at bus stops. They provide much clearer more relevant information than posting a system map. I am not sure how it would scale here, but I would like to see the MTA try something similar.
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/gett.....orough=CTY
There is much to be learned from wayfinding in London I believe. The neighborhood maps they post on the street in busy areas are great. The key innovation is that the map is oriented to the direction you are facing, so locations at the top of the map are in front of you.
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/gett.....orough=CTY