I 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?

Nice 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.

This 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.

It 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

I 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.

Nice 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.

This 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

I'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?

It 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.

My 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.

Interesting, 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)...

What a weirdly cool buy very niche site. Why 40 minutes? Why just NYC? Why just subways?

I'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

1: https://subwaysheds.com/stop/r31/atlantic-av-barclays-ctr

It 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?

WNYC 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/

You can see what it looked like here https://gothamist.com/news/map-find-out-how-long-it-takes-to...

This 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

Definitely helps to justify the Manhattan rent costs.

Since 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/

Love 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.

very 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)

A 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.

Hey ! someone finally recreated https://www.triptropnyc.com/ !

It's about time, super useful!

Lovely 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).

What's with the weird design decision not to have more West to East lines in NYC? It can make travel very convoluted.

No, 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.

It'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.

I 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.

>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

That might not be an entirely wrong assumption to make. An office worker's working hours usually has some amount of slack, and people are willing to adjust their schedule to minimize wait time. No point waiting 25 minutes every day when you can get up 5 minutes earlier and wait basically zero.

It’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.

There is no bridge or tunnel. One was started back in the 1920s and parts of it still remain but it was never completed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staten_Island_Tunnel

It’s kind of a political hot potato few want to touch these days. A tunnel feels like a no brainier but a lot of NIMBY types in Staten Island don’t want a fast connection to the rest of the city as it would likely change the area dramatically.

On 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

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/1956/04/09/archives/moses-bars-train...

The Verrazano bridge is usually baked up with traffic as is the two major highways feeding into it: Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) and the Belt Parkway. To get from SI to Manhattan by car you take the bridge to the BQE then battery tunnel into Manhattan but that's over and hour in traffic. Ferry is another option. There's no connecting subway tunnel and a single small train line runs north south to the east. Weird borough - feels like long island or upstate. Even had a shanty ghost town to the south.

There is no direct bridge or tunnel between Manhattan and Staten Island, only a ferry. Staten Island is connected to Brooklyn via the Verrazano Bridge.

It's far too long for a bridge, which would also then cut the harbor in half anyway.

You can, if just barely, to/from both lower Manhattan and Midtown -- by ferry. However presumably those routes are not factored into this map.

~25min on the Ferry which runs every half hour / every 20 minutes during rush hour

Staten Island is south of Brooklyn, as others have noted, and a good distance away — so even if we had a rail link via bridge or tunnel to Brooklyn, you’d need more work to bring it to Manhattan. You might think of using existing lines, but the closest credible line, the R train, has capacity for adding such trains, and for taking those trains into Manhattan… but it runs local along Brooklyn’s 4th Ave, making the overall trip much slower. It does join up with the D/N lines after a short distance (4 Ave Express), but the D/N has capacity limitations both at that point and later when they join the B/Q and cross the Manhattan Bridge to the 6th Ave Express/Broadway Express line. You could displace either of those services to the local track and send them into lower Manhattan via the Montague Tube link, at the cost of making trips down to Coney Island / Stillwell Ave much slower and serving areas in lower Manhattan which are less relevant than midtown.

There is some remote possibility of going out of the way to link to the F train, which even has an essentially-unused express track (portions of the system are 3-track but more of the relevant route is a full 4-track). The big problem with this is that it eventually dumps you onto the 6 Ave Local, and 6 Ave is pretty much full, local or otherwise. The only other option is the IND Crosstown, which goes to Bed-Stuy, Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Queens instead of Manhattan. The smaller problem is that the express train stops here are awkwardly located, and the potential transfer points for other lines tend to be crowded.

In short, all the good subway capacity into Manhattan is already claimed by existing services. This makes sense! The best ones are all full and the ones with spare capacity are less popular for good reason. It’d be a waste otherwise.

If you’re looking to build more capacity, you’ll need something dramatic like connecting the Second Avenue Subway. At that point I’d want to hook it up to the B/D tracks via the Rutgers Tube, send the D in Manhattan onto the new line, and divert the D in Brooklyn via the F express tracks, instead of the Brooklyn 4 Ave Express. (You could trade the B line with some clever swaps near Chrystie as an alternative.) This would free up capacity for the Staten Island service on the 4 Ave link, a much better proposition.

But given that building the existing Phase 1 mile-and-a-bit of the Second Avenue Subway ran billions of dollars and took over 70 years to happen… you may see the size of the problem you face adding many new miles in Phase 3 to connect it to the area near the Christie St Connection.

Now the pandemic might have mitigated some of this, but it’s also mitigated the benefit of the scheme in the first place, and it has strained the budgets for such projects too.

Ferry runs 24/7 and is free.