Following on from yesterday’s post about the campaign to accord PATH services equal footing with the subway lines on the MTA subway map, The Gothamist received this response from MTA representative Adam Lisberg (who’s actually really cool, and you should follow him on Twitter):

Showing other regional services like PATH in greater detail is a good use for a regional transit map, similar to the one put together for the Super Bowl. However, our map is a subway map, and its primary purpose is to serve as a guide to the subway system. We put a lot of thought into how to reduce the visual distractions and clutter on the map—we don’t even show our own railroads in much detail—but this proposal would add to those non-subway distractions.

We already show PATH where it meets the subway system, although without seeming to imply nonexistent free transfers at the Sixth Avenue stations, and making PATH more prominent would require shrinking the subway portion of the map slightly to accommodate more of the New Jersey waterfront on the same size paper.

That’s a pretty emphatic “no” in my book. Adam makes some good points – the representation of the 6th Avenue PATH stations would need some work to make clear that transfers to/from PATH are paid, not free – but it does seem like very insular thinking to me. Adam notes that the role of the map is to “serve as a guide to the subway system,” and that’s true… but I would like to expand that role to say: “serve as a guide to using rapid transit in the Greater New York area”. Despite state boundaries, the influence of New York doesn’t just suddenly stop at the Hudson River.

Source: The Gothamist