So I'm really liking this new subway map from the MTA, but I do have some thoughts. #nyct #subway #map https://map.mta.info/ 

First of all, this is a huge improvement on a lot of fronts, namely having dynamic line routing on an official MTA map is a great feature to have.

But I think the map's got one big problem, in that it seems to be designed to highlight the status of the trains in your immediate vicinity and not to give you an overview of the system as a whole. Like the map immediately tries to find your location and zoom into it.

Also, our official subway map is not, and has never been geographically accurate. This map has elements of that for the sake of rendering the lines, but it is still ultimately laid on top of a geographically accurate projection of NYC.

This makes the map particularly unideal to use at a distance, which I think is a large use case for the map. Think of any time you were trying to get into Manhattan on a weekend and had to switch routes. Chances are you were looking to compare multiple options over a large area.

It's a technological choice. I get using mapbox, developers and designers are not cartographers and mapbox and similar SDKs allow us to easily represent physical data. The problem is that in this case, is that we're locked into the cartographic projection that Mapbox provides.

So we're locked into a cartographic projection that is going to be ill suited to displaying the system as a whole, unless we're willing to build a whole new projection from scratch, which is a lot of work for perhaps not a good enough pay off. Hence the focus on hyper-local.

But then it just seems like some of the features are a product of rationalization for this trade off. The real-time train tracking visualization in particular feels like such a justification.

In the end, it's good that the map exists, and it's certainly an improvement over needing to figure out the lines during service disruptions. I do wonder however what the product could be like if it weren't tied to the hip to Mapbox and geographically accurate rendering.

Maybe the MTA should consider commissioning a new subway map to address their growing need to digitally represent the system. A map that can be easily updated in both digital and print to represent service changes is far overdue.