The New York subway in Google Earth

[mmcirvin]

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.

Comments

[babynutcase.livejournal.com]

Another thing is just try and find street addresses for train, bus or subway systems online. They are like state secrets most of the time. Is it any wonder that public transportation is so under utilized? You have to be a genius to navigate it outside your local domain.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That's actually one thing Boston's MBTA does right: they list station addresses on their own web site. New York doesn't. In fact, the thing that prompted this post was my quest to figure out the exact location of Sheepshead Bay Station near Brighton Beach. The way I finally did it was to look it up in Wikipedia: it didn't have an address, but it did have latitude and longitude coordinates, which I typed into Sam's father's DeLorme Atlas software!