Submitted by Evelyn, who says:
Hello! I just thought I’d send you my attempt at making the NYC Ferry network a bit less intimidating to navigate. While many of the issues are with the network itself (the stopping patterns are absolutely bizarre), I’ve always thought the official map made the network far harder to navigate than it should be. So here’s my attempt to fix that!
Transit Maps says:
Like Evelyn, I’ve never really been a fan of the official NYC Ferries map: it’s sloppily drawn and can’t decide if it’s a Vignelli-style diagram or a geographic map. Eventually it fails at being either, with too much room being taken up just to show the trip all the way out to Rockaway that could be better used to expand the complex East River routings and some absurdly overly-detailed coastline in Jamaica Bay.
Evelyn’s solution is distinctly diagrammatic and just looks so much better. The bold line colors cased in black really pop out of the sombre blue and grey background and are easier to follow as result. Some slight tweaking of the official colours has been made, especially to the Soundview route, which is much lighter than the official dark purple. Perhaps this makes the Rockaway and Soundview colours a bit too similar, but some tinkering could fix that pretty easily.
Labelling is generally good, though perhaps I would have stacked the Pier 11/Wall St label just to keep it well away from the St. George route line. The Brookfield Place Terminal and Corlears Hook labels are the only other area of worry: it might be possible to slide Brookfield Place a little further to the left to get a bit more empty space between the two labels.
Of particular note is that even though this is a schematic diagram, Evelyn has implied the long haul out to Rockaway without having to take up huge amounts of empty space in doing so – great work!
One thing I personally don’t like on ferry maps is too many sharp curves – ferries don’t make tight 90-degree turns out on the water, but big, lazy arcs. So the section from Astoria to Roosevelt Island to Long Island City – a whole bunch of stacked 90-degree angles – bothers me on both versions of the map. I feel there has to be a solution that looks more naturalistic: maybe the route uses curves similar to those at the Brooklyn Navy Yard stop at Roosevelt Island, just to break up the rigidness of that part of the route?
Other things I’d like to see: some sort of dash on the Governors Island (note that there’s no apostrophe in the name!) route line to immediately indicate its seasonal nature. The Staten Island Ferry – no, it’s not a NYC Ferry route, but it absolutely should be shown as an alternative for the travelling public. Finally, I believe that a route from Pier 11 to Coney Island will be launching before the end of the year, so it’s be great to see a version that incorporates that.
Our final word: Compact, bright, and more than a little bit fun. Really, really nice work!