The MTA released a beta version of a new online real-time subway map this morning, supposedly a fusion between the design sensibilities of the Vignelli diagram and the modern subway map’s geographical pragmatism. There’s certainly been a big PR push, with effusive articles being written about it and even a mini-documentary film by Gary Huswit of Helvetica fame. With all this hoopla, I had to go investigate myself… and I came away unimpressed.

First things first: the map is as slow as heck in Chrome on my iMac, and barely works at all in Safari, neither of which are particularly encouraging starts. It does run somewhat better on mobile, but we’ll have to see if the speed on desktop computers improves over the next few days, as it’s not really usable at present.

The main selling point of this map is that it has the clarity of a diagram but the fidelity of a geographical map – “The best of both worlds!” the articles happily proclaimed this morning – but the reality is more like “Jack of all trades; master of none.” As much as I try, I simply can’t see any real benefit to this approach.

A geographical base map is meant to give veracity to the data layers above it, grounding them in the real world. And this is true – for the station locations, which are fairly accurately placed. However, the paths the subway lines take between these points often bear no relation to the base map, or even reality. Let’s take a look at the services that travel across the Manhattan Bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn – the B, D, N and Q. Because of the simplified paths drawn, the B and D completely miss the bridge – clearly shown on the base layer underneath it – and seem to cross the river in a new, previously undiscovered tunnel. And inexplicably, the N and Q don’t cross the river anywhere near the Manhattan Bridge, but continue all the way down to lower Manhattan and apparently share the same tunnel as the 4 and 5 to get to Brooklyn! The station order is correct – Canal Street to DeKalb Avenue – but the route taken on the map to get there is sheer insanity.

This kind of stuff appears randomly all over the map: some lines follow the roads that they’re aligned to in real life fairly faithfully, while others stair-step their way to their destination like a 90-degree-angle-only diagram. All of the lines down to Coney Island are treated differently and it’s a visual nightmare. In real life, it’s a straight shot from Brighton Beach to Coney Island/Stillwell Avenue – look what the diagram does:

Quite frankly, there’s really no reason for this map to be diagrammatic at all outside of Manhattan – which, owing to its famous grid forms a diagram naturally. Most of the lines out in the boroughs follow a road (either elevated or dug cut-and-cover), so why not just follow them accurately and honour the base map? It’d be a more consistent approach than the “sometimes but not always” approach that’s currently been taken.

Next, let’s consider the design language of the diagram, which has fairly obviously been cribbed straight from the modern iteration of the Vignelli diagram. However, because the diagram is placed on a sprawling geographical base map instead of being a compact schematic, all the elements render too small at all but the most zoomed-in levels. The route lines are thin, the station dots are too small and the itty-bitty letters that designate services at each station are almost completely impossible to read. And once you zoom in close enough to be able to see these properly, you lose the ability to read the whole map in order to work out connections. It’s really not great, usability-wise.

There’s technical problems too: parallel 45-degree curves don’t nest properly, some route lines appear slightly on top of others at certain zoom levels, some stations sit directly on changes of direction, corner radii are inconsistently applied (and missing altogether in many locations, despite a big deal being made about the “smooth curves” present in the map). This is stuff only a wonk like me notices, but it still leaves an unfavourable first impression.

That said, the way the map can display real-time train information and adapt on the fly to service changes is certainly very impressive, as is the way more or less information is displayed depending on the zoom level. I particularly like the way that the individual service lines roll up into single trunk lines at the most zoomed-out views. It seems to me that the technology behind the map is pretty solid and is the real “revolutionary” part of this service, but the presentation of it definitely needs some polishing and refinement, because this is pretty poor and inconsistent at the moment.

Source: MTA Live Subway Map