I’m away from my computer right now so I can’t give the MTA’s new online weekend map a ride, but you can. Check it out right here in all of it’s Vignelli glory. As you poke around with the map, I would love to hear your reactions. Leave a comment with your thoughts, criticisms and potential improvements, and we’ll soon find out just how useful this new offering is.
Give the MTA’s new Weekender map a whirl
previous post
28 comments
Doesn’t look too bad.
Just took a quick peek. When you click to look at specific line- say the R, just that line shows up with the affected stops blinking. When you click on one of the affected/blinking stations, you get an explanation on the left side of the page, but the map changes to show the entire area around that station with all the other lines…and a lot of other blinking stations.
I think that switch from the individual line to the area view is going to get some people confused.
I agree – the transition after clicking a stop in line view is clunky and a bit weird.
I would prefer that the MTA change the proportions some to accommodate route changes for a visual representation of service changes, rather than descriptions of effects at the selected station.
My god is the map beautiful though.
Great idea, awful execution. The blinking dots are headache inducing, and you end up having to click on them and then having to parse through the verbose GO language anyway. Very gimmicky. I’ll stick with Subway Weekender.
Agreed, it’s pretty terrible. The blinking dots are really annoying and hard to click on, the zoomed-in map view is super tiny even if your screen is large, if the map view is maximized by clicking on the double-ended arrow, clicking on the blinking dots does nothing at all.
It’s basically an awkward color-coded interface over GO announcements, you don’t get any advantage from looking at them with the map. The main idea for something like this is to show the map of the system as it exists over the weekend (ala subwayweekender) so you can actually plan your trip. I should be able to look at the map and instantly see where the trains have been re-routed to and where they won’t stop and where the express trains are going to go local.
I won’t be back. I hope subwayweekender doesn’t stop updating his a-million-times-better map as this one is pretty much unusable.
Definitely a better map. The blinking light do help a bit, though I would prefer the Subway Weekender format and showing the actual diversion. Hmm…how about a text box that shows up when you click on the station instead of showing up on the left.
Nonetheless, a great idea!
Wow I thought it would only be part of the homepage but it seems like they made it their homepage. Kinda overkill to me.
Right now, the Weekender pretty much contains the weekday map, with LOTS of blinking lights to show the train is not stopping at some stations. Not a good idea in my opinion (we don’t need to know that the B isn’t running on the weekends, it never does.) It’d be really helpful to actually see the M being extended to 57th-6th Avenue on the map.
A step in the right direction, though. A picture is worth 1000 words, as they say.
And how would most people know that the B never runs on weekends unless it’s indicated as such on the map? Not everyone’s a train geek. On any given weekend you will find lots of people – locals and tourists alike – waiting for the M train to get them from Bryant Park to Lexington Avenue, for instance. And why? Because the MTA’s signs do not say “No M Trains on Weekends”. It is very unusual for entire lines of a subway system to not run on different days of the week, so most people naturally assume that a line runs at all times unless explicitly told otherwise. If it was up to me, all routes that didn’t run seven days a week during normal hours would be shown dashed with a note such as (Mo-Fr Only) clearly shown on the map itself, not in some small-type legend.
Exactly. Show the diversion. Blot out when something doesn’t run at all. Subway weekender does this mostly right. Heck, it even shows bustitution. Nonetheless, I find Weekender’s Service by Line and by Station helpful. And the links to the neighborhood maps for geographic accuracy…..YES!
This is really poorly done. It doesn’t actually show the service changes properly. For example, the M is extended to Manhattan this weekend, but that part of its run is still grayed out. The F is running to Euclid on the C, but it isn’t actually shown as running on that line. If you click a C local station, it tells you the C isn’t running there, but doesn’t tell you the F is!
This should be taken out back and shot. The blinking lights are horrid and no less confusing than the previous list of diversions.
Looks like there’s still a place for me after all! Yeah, I’m not sure what they were hoping to accomplish here. And I really think the choice to use the Vignelli design is going to make no sense to average straphangers. Of course I’m partial but this just adds to the confusion I think. Rest assured, I will keep at it!
Subway Weekender is better. If he can redraw the lines to show where a train is actually routed over the weekend (the F train redirected on the C line past Jay Street, say), why can’t the MTA manage the same thing?
The link to the neighborhood maps is pretty useful, but I don’t see why that’s a “weekend” enhancement rather than something they should be able to provide convenient access to at all times. Plus the neighborhood maps are static and don’t reflect the weekend changes.
I agree about the neighborhood maps Josh! That’s a great permanent feature, so why is it on the weekender?
A few comments after spending 10 minutes poking around the MTA’s Weekender site:
It’s an engineers dream!
Everyone under 50 will love it — everyone over 50 will wonder “what’s going on…”
The “Service by Line” section is the best part. Just click on the line(s) you want to use and you’re all set. It would be nice if you could highlight multiple lines at once. e.g. if my planned route involves both the 4 & R trains.
The think it’s a bit deceptive to make the M60 service to LGA look like a subway line on the high level system map on the landing page. I’m sure that it won’t be long before people from out of town start asking where the subway station at LGA is.
All in all I think its great.
why under planned work do they have a stop bypassed dot if they dont use it on the map bypassed stops still have the same blinking dot
I was hoping this would be like the Subway Weekender but with the Vignelli layout and Google Maps-like scroll-ability. It isn’t. Sadly, I really, really don’t like it.
Another MTA fail. I agree with all of the above negative comments and would like to add one of my own: not optimizing the design to allow someone to print out the information or easily access it from a mobile device is a really, really bad oversight.
And when I tried to send comments to the MTA? The system crashed. Nice work.
The best thing is the Vignelli map. It would make it really easy to graphically indicate split service (Brooklyn-bound A trains running over the F while Manhattan-bound trains run normally). The area maps are great, too, but why aren’t they available online all the time?
Am I the only person who really dislikes the Vignelli map and loves the current one? I find the Vignelli map an innacurate eyesore.
Well they’ve changed the layout for this new one. The geographical errors are fixed from what I can tell. I personally prefer this updated layout, especially since it isolates all the lines while still keeping with the trunk line colors. The Kick Map obviously does a pretty good job of combining the best of both worlds. The MTA should probably do a public survey and see if the public prefers the Kick Map, updated Vignelli or the current map. Though I’m not sure if the MTA would have to license the design from Kick.
The Kick Map is cluttered and is horribly unprofessional, with lines being represented by the wrong colors and with station names given in as many as three font sizes (and very often missing part of the name – there is no station called “23”). I can certainly understand why it isn’t being seriously considered.
I can see both sides of the issue, but I don’t like the approach of showing a separate physical line for each service. Not only does it add clutter, it obscures the multiple-services-on-a-single-line nature of the system. It eliminates the words local and express, so no longer does “D trains make local stops from 125th St to 59th St” make sense. Instead, the language has to be “D trains run on the C line from 125th St to 59th St,” which is both more confusing and more misleading. It also implies that the traveler has to decide in advance which of the two or three or four services to wait for, when in fact at almost all stations, the multiple services on a single line share a single platform.
In the context of service changes, there is a particular advantage to showing each service as a separate line: each service can be twisted and turned independent of the others. Too bad that’s not actually being done here!
There are more sophisticated forms of market research than public surveys. Railfans, who have least utility for the map, would be overrepresented, and tourists, who have greatest utility for the map, would be underrepresented. What’s needed is usability testing.
I’d say the color system and the fact that the trunk lines are still represented as a grouping of same-colored lines represents that concept enough. If anything it makes it easier to track where each line goes. We’ve all seen tourists who don’t understand the concept of separate train lines and refer to them as “the blue line” or “the red line.” This could make it easier for them to understand that although the trains of the same color run together, they are in fact different individual lines, not one train that randomly goes into 5 different parts of town. Still, this is something for the MTA to study.
As I said, I can see both sides of the issue. Branching is hardly unique to New York, and, if anything, we simplify things by (most of the time) giving separate labels to the services operating to the different branches – compare to, say, London, which has extensive branching (the District, Metropolitan, Northern, and Central lines are the most confusing).
What is nearly unique to New York is express service, and I think that’s the greater challenge to depict on a map. Everybody can tell that some red trains go to South Ferry and others go to Brooklyn, but it’s less obvious that the Brooklyn ones (usually) run express and the South Ferry ones run local. Whether a four-track trunk line should be shown as a single line with local and express stations clearly marked as such or it should be shown as a double line can be debated; I think a single line is clearer, but that’s just my gut feeling. Using three or four lines seems entirely unnecessary and only adds clutter.
That’s a good point. I think they could use the current way of having express stops as white dots, and local stops as black dots. Also, I think the concept of having a square with a line designation on it at terminals and circles at other areas would make it easier for tourists and such. Basically, take the updated Vignelli and add those two concepts. If I could find the “full-service” version of that map in a nice, big PNG or something I’d try that just for myself to see how it looks.
http://www.subchat.com/read.asp?Id=1102709
Let’s see what you come up with.
[…] « Give the MTA’s new Weekender map a whirl Sep […]
Not a big fan. Just checked out Subway Weekender’s site, much better. Didnt realize Id catch an M in Manhattan today from looking at the MTA site.
Interesting idea, though I wonder why the Vignelli map was chosen (would this mean the MTA is preparing for a comeback?).
What I don’t like are the blinking dots. Apart from being distracting, they also don’t directly convey their meaning. What should I expect as a rider when there’s ‘planned work’ at a station? Does my train bypass it? Are there restrictions on the cars where I can leave or board the train? It’s all too ambiguous and thus confusing.
Furthermore, the idea of highlighting services that do not run might be a good idea for those familiar with the system, to alert them to changes to their normal routes. However, given the fact that this map should actually only inform you about the routes that you can take and the stations that are open, I would leave those routes out alltogether.