By all accounts, Grand Theft Auto IV is a pretty awesome game. However, it would seem that the game’s designers are lousy urban planners, as this has to be the most ridiculous subway layout I have ever seen. Seriously, it looks like two racetrack layouts from a 1990s video game have been superimposed on the city with some stations added at random.

What is the point of the northern track between Huntington St and the Airport if there are no stops along it? And don’t even get me started on the whole system of inner and outer loops for each line that change route designations at some undetermined location along the way. There are two actual subway lines shown on this map (the Algonquin-Bohan loop and the Algonquin-Airport loop), but it somehow takes eight letters and numerals to describe them.

The game’s designers are basically just adding noise to make the system seem more like a “real” subway than it actually is – probably because “Liberty City” is meant to be a cipher for the Big Apple itself, which has a big, complex subway system with lots of routes.

But at least it’s cheap: a trip on the LTA only costs a dollar! I wonder who subsidises that?

Source: loh_junwei/Flickr – link no longer active