The New York subway in Google Earth

So... Why doesn't Google Earth map the New York City subway system? Is its staggering complexity too much for the mind to encompass? Are they just chicken? Boston and DC are there.

One possible reason I thought of: Google Earth's treatment of the DC system is less than satisfactory because it's designed to map geography a little too literally. So in the stretch through downtown Washington where the Blue and Orange Lines coincide in the same tunnel, the lines just get overlaid transparently on the map to produce a Vomit-Colored Line, instead of drawn next to each other as on the typical idealized transit-system map.

New York's system is vastly more complex, with several lines sharing many of the tunnels. If you tried to represent the NYC subway the Google Earth way you would have absolutely no hope of visually differentiating all the different lettered and numbered lines that share many of the tunnels. On the other hand, the MTA's own map doesn't attempt to represent all the trains as separate color-coded lines, either; they've got labels that presumably you could put on Google Earth too (in a switchable layer). It would be nice at least for cross-checking station locations with the transit map, in any event.

Somebody on the Google Earth BBS suggested that it had something to do with the authorities cracking down on ipodsubwaymaps.com, but that was different: that guy was reproducing the MTA's copyrighted map instead of drawing his own map.

Google Maps is more scattershot: it at least shows subway stations for London, but not for Boston or DC and certainly not for New York. Somebody did make a mash-up showing the New York stations, which I could have used last weekend.

More: An anonymous commenter points me to this much better Google-based NYC subway map. Scroll to the edges for a laugh.

Bad subway map

From nycsubway.org: This 1972 system map, which attempts to represent the New York system with a separate colored line for every single train (and idealizes the landforms so severely that Manhattan isn't recognizable by shape), has to be the most confusing subway map I've ever seen. Total visual overload.

This insistence on distinguishing all the trains works pretty well for Washington, DC, but it would be overly confusing even for Boston (imagine trying to distinguish the northbound Green Line trolleys that stop at Government Center from the ones that go all the way to Lechmere, while also distinguishing the BCDE trolleys as separate colored lines that converge on the same track under Tremont Street: that's close to what they did here). For NYC it's hopeless. The modern map that strikes a balance between London Tube Map-level abstraction and geographic realism is better.