8 ms·
NYC Subwaysheds
- etrautmann 3y agoThis is pretty cool and well done, but perhaps a bit optimistic on the time estimates. Starting from my station, there's really no way to get to Brooklyn in 40 min. The timing seems off by 25% or so
- crazygringo 3y agoMine seems pretty accurate, but it seems to be counting from when my train departs, not when I get to the station. Also it's not clear if it's counting waiting time when transferring, which would make a big difference.
- yownie 3y agoHey ! someone finally recreated https://www.triptropnyc.com/ https://www.triptropnyc.com/ ! It's about time, super useful!
- IIAOPSW 3y agoNice first pass, but its clearly calculating these as the pigeon flies and not taking the various stitched together street grids into account. You should get diamond and square shapes, not circles, for the most part. I'm working on a redesigned subway map / nomenclature an indicators of walking time to nearest stations is a subtle feature I want to build in. Something between a watershed like this and a vornoi diagram depending on which edge comes first.
- dylan604 3y ago>I'm working on a It's all bravado commenting on something you're working on in the comments of someone else's actual working site. Let's see the comments from a link to your site? Thought not
- pc86 3y agoI didn't take the GP's comment as overly negative or unconstructive. Yours, on the other hand, is needlessly aggressive.
- crazygringo 3y agoNo, it is clearly not as the pigeon flies. That is incorrect. When I click on my local subway stop it seems entirely accurate, and the stations don't form any kind of circle at all. In fact I can't find any subway stop origin that seems to form anything even close to a circle. Also, according to the "about" it's calculating from actual subway schedules. And it has nothing to do with street grids. It's subway trips, not walking.
- tantalor 3y ago> not walking The site says "accessible within 40 minutes by subway and walking"
- crote 3y agoNah, GP is right. The station-to-station part does indeed use subway travel times, but the website says "Hover over a station to see how much of the city is accessible within 40 minutes by subway and walking." And the "walking" part clearly shows a perfect circle around each destination station, so it is 100% doing an as-the-pigeon-flies estimation for the walking.
- parpfish 3y agoThe “pigeon flies” part is about the circles that form around each station to reflect walking time after you leave the train.
- xsmasher 3y agoParent poster is referring to the walking segments; the walking bubble around each station is a circle. Click on Rockaway park. A pigeon could reach those islands, but a walking person could not. This is still a great visualization.
- bentaber 3y agoFrom the About "Isochrones are manually calculated using turf.js assuming 1.2m/s walking speed after the subway trip. These are simple buffers around each station/prior isochrone and do not take the street network into account."
- 3y ago
- sequoia 3y agoIt's using some hybrid of isochrones & walking time "as the crow flies." The subway travel is in isochrones, but once you exit the subway the walking time assumes walking in straight lines with no obstructions in any direction. So yes that's inaccurate but it's relevant that only the walking time is done so. I assume subway ride time is based on subway schedule times.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI did this exact thing in 1st year geography. Gotta use the network analysis tool, not spatial analysis. Distance along road segments, not the Euclidean distance tool.
- IIAOPSW 3y agoYou can take a shortcut, because NYC is several large grids stitched together. If your isochron line doesn't cross a border between two grids its just a diamond instead of a circle. If it does cross the border between two grids, then you just have to figure out where along the border the "diamond" of one grid system meets the tilted diamond of the other. But you don't need a general purpose road network analysis tool to do it. It may even be tractable analytically.
- Waterluvian 3y agoThat’s pretty clever.
- dgrin91 3y agoWhat a weirdly cool buy very niche site. Why 40 minutes? Why just NYC? Why just subways?
- parpfish 3y agoBecause it’s a niche site and that’s what it’s about? “Interesting niche site about birds in the authors backyard. But why doesn’t it also talk about the trees in my backyard?”
- dylan604 3y agoWhy would you go to subawaysheds.com to learn about taxicab stands? that would obviously be taxicabstands.com. Why just NYC? Because does anything else exist outside of NYC? Maybe atlantic city, or the catskills, or niagra falls, but everything else is just unimportant
- woodruffw 3y agoAs a New Yorker: 40 minutes is roughly my boundary between "ordinary trip with no prior thought" and "I'll set aside a dedicated time and/or day to make this trip." The city's bus lines are much more variable in service, and don't offer as many interborough routes.
- liminal 3y agoDefinitely helps to justify the Manhattan rent costs.
- wnc3141 3y agoIt would be interesting to incorporate the ferry times the staten island train only appears 40 min. to staten island
- chillydawg 3y agoit's called an isochrone.
- thih9 3y agoI enjoyed it, nice idea and execution, it feels very intuitive. One thing surprised me after I clicked around, I did not expect each station to become a separate browser history entry.
- napsterbr 3y agoI had the same surprise. Which raises an interesting question: does that count as "breaking the back button"? Theoretically, no: the back button is working as expected. At the same time, it was a significantly worse experience for me because it took a lot longer to go back to the "parent" page (HN).
- parpfish 3y agoIt seems to make the assumption that you’ll get any particular train instantly. Factor in expected wait time for each line and the local/express variants and the sheds will shrink substantially. it’ll also get confusing because the sheds will change as a function of time of day
- afavour 3y agoIt’s still interesting/useful, though. Once you require factoring in average train wait times and stuff like that the project is going to be way too complex to ever be achievable.
- parpfish 3y agofor sure, it's still useful, but i think it might be worth some sort of down-weighting for trains that run less frequently. for example, if the ratio of local:express trains is 5:1, the watershed should be more heavily influenced by what's accessible in 40 minutes via local. this is also in part due to the way people use the subway in NY -- nobody looks at a timetable and says "i'll head down to the station to catch the 6:37 express" like you would in some cities with reliable timetables/schedules. in NY, you just go to the station and wait and hope the train you want shows up next/soon.
- chimeracoder 3y ago> this is also in part due to the way people use the subway in NY -- nobody looks at a timetable and says "i'll head down to the station to catch the 6:37 express" like you would in some cities with reliable timetables/schedules. in NY, you just go to the station and wait and hope the train you want shows up next/soon. That was true 15 years ago, but it's less true today now that there's a multitude of apps (both the first-party MyMTA app and many third-party apps which are much better) which make this easy. Even Google Maps gives train times in their directions, and they're mostly accurately updated as delays happen, etc.
- MisterTea 3y ago
- pbw 3y agoSince it's Mapbox I wonder if they are using the Isochrone API[1], or if this is more custom b/c it's subways? I agree an adjustable duration of trip would be neat. [1] - https://docs.mapbox.com/api/navigation/isochrone/ https://docs.mapbox.com/api/navigation/isochrone/
- et-al 3y agoHere's the author's source code: https://github.com/chriswhong/nyc-subway-isochrones https://github.com/chriswhong/nyc-subway-isochrones If they were using the Isochrone API, the buffers around the subway stations would take in account the street grid vs a circle. That's really cool that Mapbox now offers an API to do this. It seems like it also factors in elevation as well!
- fnord77 3y agoherald sq and grand central seem to be the maximals
- mightybyte 3y agoI saw something very similar to this some years back. Can't remember the site though.
- philshem 3y agohttps://www.chronotrains.com/en/station/2988507-Paris/5 https://www.chronotrains.com/en/station/2988507-Paris/5 ???
- woodruffw 3y agoThis is a very cool visualization! I'm especially impressed by how it handles the local and express routes: North Brooklyn is only about 15 minutes door-to-door from Lower Manhattan on the Fulton Line[1] express A train, and the map correctly shows that. Nice work! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IND_Fulton_Street_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IND_Fulton_Street_Line
- wnolens 3y agoLove it, but UWS to Bushwick in 40 minutes - I wish! This feels like a 10th percentile stat. Change the 10-40m range to be 15-55m and it will be closer to what I experience on a daily basis. Great resource for visitors to NYC to set expectations.
- gipp 3y agoJust comparing to my own intuition, I'd guess it's using a train's departure from the origin station as the "start" time for a trip.
- wnolens 3y agoYea, and ideal transfers (~zero wait). and perfect schedule (no real-time stats of drift).
- etrautmann 3y agoYep, exactly my thought. Super valuable if scaled to be more accurate.
- neom 3y agoL train estimates are generally a pipe dream on this site, a beautiful beautiful pipe dream.
- dylan604 3y agoI'm not from NYC, so maybe this is obvious, but why can you not get from Staten Island to Manhattan in 40mins? Is there really not bridge/tunnel that can get you there?
- gipp 3y agoIt's far too long for a bridge, which would also then cut the harbor in half anyway.
- mynameisvlad 3y agoThe longest bridges in the world are over 100km in length, why would this be too long? Bridges can also be tall, if the concern is cutting boat traffic.
- gipp 3y agoThe only bridges approaching that length over water are causeways. The harbor is too deep for that, and again a causeway would not permit shipping traffic. It would also be a massive eyesore
- sempron64 3y agoThere is no direct bridge or tunnel between Manhattan and Staten Island, only a ferry. Staten Island is connected to Brooklyn via the Verrazano Bridge.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lisasays 3y agoYou can, if just barely, to/from both lower Manhattan and Midtown -- by ferry. However presumably those routes are not factored into this map.
- woodruffw 3y agoOn top of what 'sempron64 said: there was a plan to construct a subway tunnel between Brooklyn and Staten Island[1], but construction was canceled nearly a century ago. The Verrazano Bridge itself was designed under Robert Moses's eye, and he shut down the idea of a subway link early on[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staten_Island_Tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staten_Island_Tunnel [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/1956/04/09/archives/moses-bars-train-on-narrows-span-mocks-idea-of-transit-link-from.html https://www.nytimes.com/1956/04/09/archives/moses-bars-train...
- donohoe 3y agoNeat but does not account for possible transfers - and maybe thats not a bad thing?
- weatherlight 3y agovery cool. but I noticed some of the stop information is incorrect. for example, the franklin stop on the C train in Brooklyn, isn't connected to the franklin stop on the shuttle. (I live like 2 blocks from that station)
- afavour 3y agoI’ve taken that connection so I assure you it is! The S train is elevated and quite a walk from the C platform but they are accessible from each other (including via elevator, which is a rarity)
- weatherlight 3y agoLook at the map, its listed as two separate stations. I'm in agreement with you, they are the same station.
- woodruffw 3y agoIs this true? I haven't taken the Franklin Ave shuttle in a decade, but I remember it being on the top floor of the Franklin Ave station (with the C platform being in the basement).
- Footkerchief 3y agoIf you live 2 blocks away, you probably often see the green skyway that crosses Fulton to connect the C and S ;)
- weatherlight 3y agolook at the map, they're listed as two separate stations. I'm saying this is false, they are the same station.
- weatherlight 3y agoEdit: in the map they aren't connected. It shows them as two separate stations. Im arguing that they are the same station. And one can transfer easily from the "C" to the "Shuttle" and vice versa.
- bovinegambler 3y agoWNYC had a cool one a few years ago that also included time to get to/from stations but it seems their MapBox account isn't working anymore: https://project.wnyc.org/transit-time/ https://project.wnyc.org/transit-time/ You can see what it looked like here https://gothamist.com/news/map-find-out-how-long-it-takes-to-get-anywhere-in-the-city-via-subway https://gothamist.com/news/map-find-out-how-long-it-takes-to...
- yownie 3y agoremember https://www.triptropnyc.com/ https://www.triptropnyc.com/ ? I used this to find a place to stay when I worked on Canal, ended up finding Sunset Park neighborhood around 36th street station and loving the area.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mithr 3y agoInteresting, and it's cool to see an illustration of how weird it is that there's no quick way to cross the park! It takes the same ballpark amount of time to get from east 86th St & 2nd to Kew Gardens (~14 miles apart) as it does to get from east 86th & 2nd to west 86th St & Broadway (~1.5 miles apart)...
- CydeWeys 3y agoThere are buses running the transverses. I think this map only does subway. Check Google Maps transit directions and you'll see.
- bombcar 3y agoThis kind of tool would be absolutely brilliant as part of Zillow. I'd love to see various distances from properties assuming bike, or walking, or driving, etc. Everyone who lives in a neighborhood knows these things, but it's really hard to figure it out before without traveling there and attempting some things.
- USB5 3y agoZillow already has that. You input an address and it tells you the distance in time by transportation method on each property details screen. You can also sort properties according to distance from the given address. The software labels it a "work" address, but you will face no consequences for using an address that you do not work at.
- mfitton 3y agoThe problem is that this shows you how long it takes to get to a single place, rather than showing a map visualization like this site. I've often really wanted this on StreetEasy especially. I don't want to know how long it takes just to get to work, I want to know how long it takes to every neighborhood I regularly travel to.
- fasthands9 3y agoAgree it could be better. I recently moved and wanted to be close to work but also close to a few friends. It would be cool if you could put in two (or more) locations and it would map out areas. I'm sure some ones would have popped up I didnt consider.
- bombcar 3y agoExactly. Commute time is interesting and useful but easy to find in a million ways. I want to know all the places I don’t know about that are X minutes away.
- pokey96 3y agoI've sort of done this using the Walk score transit heat maps (they have similar for biking and walking as well) for getting a more broad feel for what areas are walkable/bikeable/less car dependant while house shopping, using a user script that takes the map tiles from Walkscore and injects them into the Google maps instance on Zillow. However, you could definitely generate the distance from a point heat/contour maps using QGIS/OSM data and overlay the tiles that way as well. Would be super nice if this was built into Zillow, or any MLS browsing tool for that matter...
- shmerl 3y agoWhat's with the weird design decision not to have more West to East lines in NYC? It can make travel very convoluted.
- chimeracoder 3y agoWith the exception of three stops on the UWS that took about a century to build[0] and one additional stop on the 7, ~all of the subway stops were built 80+ years ago, via one of three independent private train companies. Those three companies eventually went bankrupt and were taken over by the city, and then later the state. So I wouldn't call anything a "design decision" in this case, insofar as it was never designed intentionally to be a comprehensive public transit system the way we think of it today. [0] Not an exaggeration - Phase 1 was originally supposed to be completed before WWII.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoI'd surmise that cut-and-cover construction was more politically feasible on the wider avenues where business disruption is minimized.
- pimlottc 3y agoIt would be fantastic if Google Maps and the like could take this into account when searching instead of just naively relying on distance. 2 miles away along a well-developed transit corridor is much "closer" to me than 2 miles away in a direction with no bus or rail options. Sometimes I'd be happy to go halfway across town if I can just take a single train there and it's close by the station. Especially if it involves picking up packages or heavily items.
- asdff 3y agoGoogle maps is pretty basic for its routing. For example, I use a skateboard to commute to transit stops. It effectively cuts walk times in half or more and is easy to carry on a crowded train. There is no way to set this average walking/skating speed, however, so the routes they choose are not optimal and require my own localized knowledge of the transit network and schedule, and knowing the best routes for skating fast. This doesn't just affect skaters, but people who might have a bike or scooter they can use between transit trips. You can imagine all the much more optimal routings that become possible when you can suddenly move 10-15mph on a whim between point A and B.
- NoToP 3y agoGoogle maps seems to have evolved into something by and for car-centric user base.
- atyppo 3y agoApple didn’t exactly do a speedy rollout of bike directions in their Maps app. I find it hard to blame Google here. Seems more like a symptom of our society to me.
- asdff 3y agoThe best transit app I use is this ancient mobile website from my local transit agency. It just has a live map of a chose route and shows where the busses are, and it looks like its some original mobile web app type of stuff like from 15 years ago. What makes it great is how lightweight it is. If I have a spotty data connection or I want to preserve battery, I know I can rely on it a lot more than google maps or other bloated transit apps.
- pimlottc 3y agoI'd be interested to know what the "best" stop is based on this - which station has the largest accessible area? Times Square [0] has the most connections, but Atlantic Av [1] has better coverage of Brooklyn. Hard to tell which is larger, though. 0: https://subwaysheds.com/stop/r16/times-sq-42-st https://subwaysheds.com/stop/r16/times-sq-42-st 1: https://subwaysheds.com/stop/r31/atlantic-av-barclays-ctr https://subwaysheds.com/stop/r31/atlantic-av-barclays-ctr
- gen220 3y agoIf you open it up to include LIRR, NJT and Metro North, Penn Station / Times Square / Grand Central is probably the winner. :)
- elijahbenizzy 3y agoLovely viz! I'd like to see the # of minutes as a parameter (maybe in steps of 5), and also include ferries (Staten Island is, well, an island).
- efuquen 3y agoNice visual tool but wildly optimistic. Walk times to and from stations and during transfers can eat up huge amounts of time in a commute, and that assumes trains are running well. Discounting walking to station times which clearly can't be taken into account in this tool, the transfer times between trains are also not taken into account. Transferring over from any train that is taking you up the west side to one that takes you up the east side (or vice versa) of Manhattan takes up a lot of extra time but the maps treats them as if it doesn't matter what side of the island your original train will take you.
- camgunz 3y agoA thing most people don't know about NYC is that it's real hard to get from Brooklyn to Queens without a car. This map makes that really visible, which is pretty cool.
- chirau 3y agoYeah, the G tries but it is nowhere near sufficient. Then there is the E and A. You would have to ride those for hours since you have to go through Manhattan.
- supernova87a 3y agoI have a somewhat different concern, exposed by the map and how far some places are from being well served. The map itself is great. Will the NYC subway system ever evolve further? My mind is on Tokyo a lot lately, because of some recent visits, and also probably related I get served up a bunch of Youtube videos about how the Tokyo metro has evolved over time. The subway system in Tokyo improved over decades by forcing interoperation of rail systems, improving control systems, building new track, unified fare systems, etc. etc. So today you have a system where (for example), every 5 minutes, you can take a commuter train from an outer suburb that enters the city center, becomes a subway train, lines up with automated platform gates, hits every stop within seconds of expected, emerges from the subway system and continues to the airport as an airport express train. They did this not out of some desire for some luxury level train system, but because it was necessary to support the number of people who had to rely on it as a system. Of course, they had the benefit of being a system that could change post-war, and bulldoze land that was not yet staked out and developed. But still, is NYC's subway forever frozen in the current state of shittiness? What needs to happen / how will it happen that it ever improves from here? How is the demand for the NYC subway not turning into improvements? We're just out of money and political will I guess?
- voidfunc 3y agoIt sort of helps that Tokyo was firebombed into oblivion roughly 80 years ago. Much easier to build, expand, and maintain. Also an entirely different culture around transportation and property rights not to mention civic pride.
- woodruffw 3y agoAs someone who's a subway "maximalist": despite my (and millions of others') desire for a radically expanded network, I don't think we'll see one. The political (and capital) costs of expanding the network are immense, and the incentives are all wrong: the MTA is a state agency rather than a city one, meaning that a perpetually underfunded and worse-than-acceptable subway system is a useful piece of political leverage against the city. Instead, we may see some "expansion" the network by reviving old lines that have fallen into disuse and taking over industrial/freight lines that see less use. The IBX[1] is one such development; my hope is that the MTA also considers re-expanding the G's service back out to Forest Hills (as it was before 2001)[2]. TL;DR: Massive capital investment and home rule need to happen. [1]: https://new.mta.info/project/interborough-express https://new.mta.info/project/interborough-express [2]: https://greenpointers.com/2023/01/23/op-ed-5-ways-to-improve-the-g-train/ https://greenpointers.com/2023/01/23/op-ed-5-ways-to-improve...
- adolph 3y agoIt is interesting that it shows Jamaica - 179th St to Flushing - Main St as within 40 minutes but not the inverse. More dramatic is Far Rockaway - Mott Ave to Liberty Ave. I wonder what station has the best coverage?
- twic 3y agoMy nitpick is even more absurd than everyone else's: the name "subwayshed" evokes watersheds, but that's not what this map shows at all! That could describe a map where you mouse over a station, and it colours the rest of the map according to what line from that station will get you there fastest (after whatever changes are necessary). Which would be even more pointless.
- throwaway2037 3y ago"Unlock station hover"