How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in NYC?

https://subwaysheds.com/#11.27/40.7427/-73.9869

by jxmorris12 • 1 year ago

328 200 1 year ago

subwaysheds.com

xhkkffbf• 1 year ago

Does it take into account the way that some subway lines run much less frequently than others?

amanda99• 1 year ago

No, it seems to assume changing trains is instantaneous and trains are waiting for you.

lotsofpulp3• 1 year ago

Which is why people prefer personal cars whenever possible. Mass transit has to operate at 5 minute intervals (so that you are waiting at most 10 to 15 minutes in the event of a missed connection).

If it isn’t that frequent, then I am going to opt for a personal car every chance I can. Using only the subway in Manhattan/some parts of Brooklyn is convenient, but as you stray further, it starts getting tedious.

baq• 1 year ago

Technical term is isochrone map: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map

kittikitti• 1 year ago

Thank you so much for this, I have trouble communicating time from maps even though its often so interconnected and this concept opens it up.

pella• 1 year ago

"Full code for the isochrone workflow is available on"

https://github.com/chriswhong/nyc-subway-isochrones

davidw• 1 year ago

Mapbox also provides an isochrone API: https://docs.mapbox.com/playground/isochrone/

intexpress• 1 year ago

Jackson Heights is the winner here

acjohnson557• 1 year ago

The loser is 241st in the Bronx. Can't even get out of the Borough.

Unless we're also considering Staten Island, which few do :)

mgce• 1 year ago

Also the Rockaways, which are famous for being remote and poorly transit-served.

saltcod• 1 year ago

Very cool project

Tade05• 1 year ago

I'm of the opinion that every 500k+ city should have a subway line.

I grew up in a city with one (just one for the majority of my 20 years there) and if there's one thing I miss from that place it's the ability to move at an average speed of 35km/h at any time the trains were operating, especially at 2am on a Friday night after a couple of beers with the guys.

The other thing I noticed when I was visiting my family there during the recent holidays is that there are so few cars in places close to the subway lines - roughly half the usual concentration. The incentive to have one is just not strong enough.

xvedejas2• 1 year ago

I'm of the opinion that it depends on density. You could build a subway line in some US cities of 1M and nobody would ride it; you could build a subway line in a city of 50k and everyone would ride it. It depends on whether there is density to support walking directly to many things (businesses, residences, and other transit lines) or not.

HPsquared• 1 year ago

The subway is the big expensive investment. In theory, businesses and housing etc would develop around the stations. Like how suburbs develop around train stations.

balderdash2• 1 year ago

Density yes, but more importantly 1) speed vs traveling by car, 2) starting and stopping in places people want to travel between, 3) safety, 4) real estate prices/regulation.

Density goes to number 1 (more traffic = better reason to use the subway) and 2 (more likely to be able to serve people’s desired trip)

bobthepanda4• 1 year ago

Also the shape of density.

A small city in a straight line along the coast is going to get a lot more mileage out of a single line than something spread out across a plain.

CalRobert3• 1 year ago

In the ideal scenario you build the subway or other transit when density is low and land is relatively cheap, and THEN you make it high density.

Doing it after the fact is much, much harder.

42772827• 1 year ago

Building a subway system after the city is so dense that it will be ridden by “enough” people is exactly the wrong way to create livable urban spaces.

Building a subway is the solution to inducing density, not responding to it.

telesilla2• 1 year ago

If not a subway at least some form of transport that won't get stuck in gridlock. Three examples I can think of are the Wuppertal suspension railway, Las Vegas monorail (though more of a tourist pull than for the locals) and the dedicated Metrobus lanes in Mexico City.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertal_Schwebebahn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_Monorail

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metrob%C3%BAs

What others have I missed?

(btw I never noticed before that HN can't handle UTF-8 chars in urls)

kjkjadksj3• 1 year ago

American cities of 500k people really don’t see gridlock though. Maybe a couple blocks downtown by the highway ramps thats it.

fsckboy• 1 year ago

yes, but wikipedia can handle unaccented

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metrobus

Gh0stRAT• 1 year ago

You missed Adelaide's O-Bahn, which is another way to mitigate the "buses get stuck in traffic" problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-Bahn_Busway

oblio• 1 year ago

They don't need silly suspension railways in most places. A tram line fits perfectly in 1 lane, so that would make it 2 lanes for both ways. US lanes are so wide that it's likely 2 tram rails fit in 1.5 road lanes, with a bit of extra room for wider sidewalks (sorely needed in most of the US), bike lanes (also sorely needed in most of the US) or just general greenery (hedges would do wonders for US urban landscapes...).

Of course this would require that the 3-4 lane stroads give up 2 of their carlanes so instead of doing the reasonable thing, building infrastructure costing 10x is almost universally preferred.

Heck, it doesn't even need to be a tram. BRTs are good enough for a lot of cases.

ascagnel_• 1 year ago

It's only a short stretch, running the length of I-495, but the XBL in the Lincoln Tunnel is a huge reason why people bother with the bus in northern NJ.

When I was commuting by bus, the inbound morning trip (with XBL) was 20-30 minutes, and the outbound evening trip (without XBL) was 30-45 minutes.

https://www.panynj.gov/bridges-tunnels/en/lincoln-tunnel/xbl...

flyinghamster• 1 year ago

In Chicago, the "L" network also has stretches that run down expressway medians, along with the elevated lines and the subway sections downtown.

keiferski2• 1 year ago

Having lived in / visited a few dozen cities in Europe, I actually think trams are generally preferable to subways. In places with both, I tend to use the trams almost exclusively.

A hop on, hop off tram system is much quicker and efficient than going into a subway station, then back up, etc. At least if you aren’t going entirely across town.

euroderf• 1 year ago

Trams do need dedicated lanes.

JumpCrisscross2• 1 year ago

* trams are generally preferable to subways. In places with both, I tend to use the trams almost exclusively*

In towns with trams I've found Ubers almost always faster. That said, most American trams are at grade, so you get a bus that can't change lanes.

Tade05• 1 year ago

What makes for a more pleasant experience is not necessarily the optimal choice for commuters as subway wins over trams by close to an order of magnitude in terms of throughput.

In the city I grew up in during rush hour subway trains leave less than every two and a half minutes and pack well over a thousand commuters each. That is an impossible feat for even the best tram system, as they're limited both in vehicle and station length, not to mention speed, as you can't have 40 tonnes of metal hurtling at 80km/h through intersections.

rightbyte2• 1 year ago

I disagree. Trams are too slow. They are not good for long tracks, like sub ways.

SllX• 1 year ago

If I’m going one, maybe two stops, a tram can be optimal if it’s already in front of me[1]. Otherwise the subway tends to win the curb to curb speed contest for me. It’s a little more traversing through the subway’s infrastructure and getting to the right platform and the right part of the platform, but I’ll get to my destination in less time and it’s not even close.

[1] Otherwise I have to check the Transit app on my phone and do some math factoring in the wait time and the time it takes me to get to the platform. The subway usually wins this contest too.

ekianjo4• 1 year ago

Trams are super slow. They take space on the road or need their own full lanes. It's much worse than a subway.

7thpower• 1 year ago

Have you spent much time in ~500k cities? Many of them have a lot of sprawl and very little traffic.

umanwizard4• 1 year ago

Where would you put the subway line in Tucson, AZ?

Tade05• 1 year ago

I'm no city planner, but I would definitely connect the Amrtak station with the University of Arizona and on the other end make it reach the edge of downtown.

The rest of the city is really spread out with all those detached houses, so I'm out of ideas but then again my city put a subway station in such a location and it serves a whopping fifteen hundred people daily - that's one subway car, but at the same time appropriately a thousand fewer cars on the road. Still worth it in my book.

rayiner3• 1 year ago

With subway lines costing a billion dollars a mile that just makes no sense.

ekianjo4• 1 year ago

Where did you find that cost?

eDIT Looks like you are right for the US. In other countries it's apparently much cheaper.

https://www.hsrail.org/blog/why-transit-projects-cost-more-i...

For example, the Purple Line in Los Angeles cost $800 million per mile. By international standards, the New York price tag is stratospheric: A project in Madrid cost $320 million per mile, and one in Paris cost just $160 million per mile.

wonder_er• 1 year ago

most us cities did have subways (or streetcars), then GM bought 'em all and shut them down. [0]

[0] Taken for a Ride - The U.S. History of the Assault on Public Transport in the Last Century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-I8GDklsN4&t=1590s

richiebful1• 1 year ago

Did the US have any subways shut down? I know there are some metros like Cincinnati that abandoned an unfinished subway

Scoundreller3• 1 year ago

and if there's one thing I miss from that place it's the ability to move at an average speed of 35km/h at any time the trains were operating

I think ours could go up to 50 or 60km/h, but the density of stations (can’t leave any blocks behind!), station dwell times and time for one transfer puts it at equal time to cycling for me in Toronto.

And my cycling route isn’t a more direct route (cuz our surface routes are largely a grid and we just replicated it underground instead of something more synergizing like a giant X).

A fun hobby of mine is to open up Paris on google maps and compare the cycling and transit times in their daytime between arbitrary points and cycling often wins. Theyre drunk on station density so you’re always close to one, but it means a lot of stopping.

asah2• 1 year ago

Hard no: subway infrastructure is incredibly expensive and only makes sense for high density cities.

Moreover, with self driving electric cars, cities will see many of the benefits at far lower cost.

bdunks• 1 year ago

I love this. I agree with the "about" that it's visually compelling, and I'm mesmerized.

This doesn't detract from my enjoyment the site, but for trip planning I'm a little skeptical of the results around the edges, especially when I'm assuming multiple transfers would be required (e.g., Local -> Express -> Express -> Local).

With a caveat this was over 10 years ago (~2012-2013), and train frequencies may have changed:

I used to live pretty far up on the upper west side, and took the 1 train from the 103rd street station daily. My weekday route was 1 -> 2/3 -> 7 into midtown. The 20 minute radius is accurate at peak times, when it only takes 2-3 minutes to catch a transfer. However, the website "about" makes an assumption this is for noon on a weekday. I don't think I ever made it to Brooklyn in under 40 minutes.

amelius3• 1 year ago

Does it also work at 3am?

jpalawaga2• 1 year ago

It does. New York's system is one of only a handful in the world that operates all (or nearly all) lines 24/7.

acjohnson557• 1 year ago

The level of redundancy in the NYC subway is marvelous. In most of the densest areas, you have 4-track lines and often other lines within a mile. It makes it possible to do maintenance while still offering 24/7 service.

amelius3• 1 year ago

I don't see any violations of locality here.

rst2• 1 year ago

There are a few -- select the 79th street station on the #1 line (farthest west in Manhattan) and look at Brooklyn, due pretty much directly south. The 36th Street station on the D/N/R lines is reachable in 40 minutes because it gets express service, but the stations to the north and south are local stops, and for that reason, take longer to get to.

_kb• 1 year ago

There a pretty neat free tool - http://pedestriancatch.com - that will also let you run walkability simulation anywhere with OpenStreetMap data. Great for when you’re moving or exploring somewhere new.

dzonga• 1 year ago

nice too. but been a while since I lived in NY. what these things don't tell ya is how frequent the trains break down. my morning commute would be 30 mins on a packed train, but the evening train would be 2x-3x that time due to trains / track issues.

londons_explore• 1 year ago

Travel times would be much improved by a high speed line.

Ie. a route with 4 stops and a travel speed of 100 mph.

The finances of railways actually get better with faster trains - because the sooner you can get the person to their destination, the quicker you can get that train serving another passenger.

pavel_lishin2• 1 year ago

MTA runs express trains. They don't get up to 100mph, but they skip many local stops along the way. Raising their speed to 100mph would likely not meaningfully increase transit time - you'd maybe shave off a few minutes.

bob_theslob6465• 1 year ago

I wonder if there was a way to calculate how many more passengers they could serve if they had faster trains?

LeanderK• 1 year ago

it boggles my mind that a place like new york doesn't have the money to just do that. Raising the speed limit gets more important the longer you travel and connects distant parts your city better. It's a recent trend to build high-speed lines to complement an existing, dense subway network (e.g. Paris goes up to 75 mph).

I mean when were these built, a 100 years ago? Surely there's room for improvement.

marcinzm7• 1 year ago

You do realize that Manhattan is only 14 miles long? With a stop every 3 miles even a Shinkansen wouldn't reach 100mph before it had to start slowing down again.

bob_theslob6465• 1 year ago

According to chatgpt, the max speed is higher than what you stated and is 155mph before needing to slow down.

pieix• 1 year ago

Are there any metros with intra-city high speed trains like this?

Symbiote3• 1 year ago

In London you can take a high speed train from St Pancras to Stratford, though it's a normal high speed train that then continues far outside the city.

It's the blue+yellow line which goes off the east side: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/london-rail-and-tube-services-map...

I don't think that's unusual for very large cities with high speed trains. The longest-distance trains probably only stop at one station in each city, but medium-distance trains can stop at multiple.

I've never come across a metro train travelling that fast though. The cost of building the line to support those speeds would be tremendous for a small difference in journey time.

notjustanymike2• 1 year ago

Some kind of Metro (that runs) North?

matv• 1 year ago

Very cool!

jimmySixDOF• 1 year ago

Nice effort and just shows you how far the art/science of dataviz has come with the ability of websites to work like realtime game engines.

This is the same information visually expressed in a grid chart from 1983 by Edward Tufte (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information). While the method can't scale the same way it feels like a more creative approach :

https://www.edwardtufte.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/VDQI-...

seabass-labrax• 1 year ago

I wouldn't say that Maray's chart as cited by Tufte is directly comparable: it displays the timings of trains along a one-dimensional railway, therefore displaying two dimensions of continuous data for each train (the second dimension being time). The online map displays a two-dimensional area, with an extra (quantized, not continuous) dimension of time with the colour-coding. It's a tradeoff between displaying more precision for fewer train timings or less precision for many train timings.

piinbinary• 1 year ago

Why don't any of the trains go into New Jersey? That seems like a big wasted opportunity for adding more space that can easily commute into the city.

marcinzm7• 1 year ago

Trains do go into New Jersey from NYC. Just not MTA trains.

pavel_lishin2• 1 year ago

Because it's the New York City subway.

There are trains that go to New Jersey - the PATH trains, as well as NJtransit commuter trains that leave from Penn Station.

ryanhecht2• 1 year ago

Excellent information if you're playing Jet Lag: The Game's[1] home game[2]

1: https://www.youtube.com/c/jetlagthegame

2: https://store.nebula.tv/products/hideandseek

CSMastermind2• 1 year ago

I've been meaning to try it out in NYC because it seems like that's one of few geos they playtested. It's super fun in other cities but you have to modify the rules and cards a bunch to make it work.

ryanhecht2• 1 year ago

I'm a huge theme park nut that lives in Orlando - I'm trying to design a version that can work across Walt Disney World (or maybe even ALL of Orlando's theme park campuses).

Photos pose a huge challenge because my friends (fellow theme park nuts) can pick out the smallest details in every park -- even the color of pavement and themed lighting fixtures! I'm having fun thinking of what adaptations to make.

Agreed that this product would be better as a game design framework rather than a ready-to-play game in any geo (and tbh, would be a better fit for what Jet Lag is all about: people designing games for themselves to play!)

jklein11• 1 year ago

Super cool! Its kinda crazy how out of the loop JFK airport is

ghthor• 1 year ago

I made the mistake of trying to use subway to get to JFK. That day I learned the way was to take the LIRR from grand central station.

notjustanymike2• 1 year ago

Shockingly easy to get to though. LIRR to Jamaica, then AirTrain. Usually faster than a car, and more predictable than taking the A (which you have to be careful to choose the right one).

fldskfjdslkfj2• 1 year ago

It's crazy how dysfunctional the state structure can be - in any functioning country the subway would extend to NJ.

marcinzm7• 1 year ago

The PATH train does exactly that.

fldskfjdslkfj2• 1 year ago

the PATH train is a lousy a replacement. Just look at the connectivity and coverage of NJ vs Queens & Brooklyn:

https://stewartmader.com/wp-content/uploads/Subway-NY-NJ-sca...

acjohnson557• 1 year ago

It would make much more sense for it to be unified with the MTA subway, with more connectivity. My dream would be a single seat ride from Newark Airport to Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn, via Newark Penn Station and World Trade Center.

There was also once a proposal to have the 7 train go out to Seacaucus Junction, which would be huge for accessing the East Side for NJers.

SJetKaran• 1 year ago

Big +1, and an obvious observation for anyone who moved here

marstall• 1 year ago

it does, check out PATH.

ahstilde2• 1 year ago

Transit in NJ is served by PATH, NJ Transit Rail, and NJ Transit Light Rail

They share multiple exchanges.

Crossing state lines causes regulations to triple (new state, and federal), so this is what we have.

umanwizard4• 1 year ago

There is a subway that connects Manhattan and NJ, called the PATH. Unfortunately it’s run by a completely different organization, which I agree is silly.

jpalawaga2• 1 year ago

Something here is not quite right. For example, if you look at the 7th ave line (red line/1,2,3) 18th street and 14th street have similar radii.

But anyone knows that 14th street is much more convenient because it's triply serviced by the 1,2,3 with 2,3 being express trains. 18th street is serviced by one train the runs locally. This ignores that you could easily switch to the L, A/C/E, F/M with a short walk.

Still, a cool visualization to show the power of mass transit, and even compare relatively between lines.

mannykannot• 1 year ago

I see what you mean. According to this map, you can get from the 18th. street station to the 1st ave. stop on the L in ten minutes, but not from 14th. street.

acomjean• 1 year ago

Does it include the express trains? (those trains that skip a bunch of stops on certain lines, so they can go faster like the 2)

I couldn't figure that out. I remember when I was in NY those trains really moved.

https://mta.info/map/5346

wgerard• 1 year ago

I think it includes transfers and express lines. I noticed if I click on a local stop that meets an express line somewhere, the express line stops are still quite a bit darker than other stops.

That's likely why 18th and 14th street are so similar: It only takes a minute or two to get from 18th st -> 14th st.

asah2• 1 year ago

Time of day / day or week ?

I got screwed yesterday waiting 23 minutes for an F when normally I'd 5 mins or less.

anyonecancode• 1 year ago

Cool! Though the data must be a bit noisy as you get some oddities. For instance, if you select Astoria/Ditmars (last top, NW Queens) the Flushing/Main Street stop (last stop of purple -- go directly west on map from Astoria) is out of range. Click Flushing/Mains Street, though, and Astoria/Ditmars is in the 40 minute range.

65• 1 year ago

I live in NYC and I can tell you... these times seem optimistic.

rst2• 1 year ago

They're assuming very quick transfers (rush hour service). But then again, a lot of transit planning seems to assume rush hour commutes are the only reason why it's there.

karaterobot• 1 year ago

Isochrones are manually calculated using turf.js assuming 1.2m/s walking speed after the subway trip.

This is super cool, and I don't want the following statement to be taken as a criticism, because it's an unrealistic expectation: I do not rely on estimates like this until they are ground-truthed.

kjkjadksj3• 1 year ago

I wonder if they factored in the time to walk to and from the surface and platform here. Also intersection signal patterns on the surface.

binary132• 1 year ago

I’ve always wanted a feature like this in Zillow for filtering the results by commute time to a given destination, but this is even cooler!

bowsamic• 1 year ago

Much slower than I would have guessed

ahstilde2• 1 year ago

This is great. It doesn't paint a full picture, however. It's certainly possible to go farther leveraging the other rail lines in the area: PATH, LIRR, Metro North, NJ Transit Light Rail

kjkjadksj3• 1 year ago

Depends what your transfer process looks like. Some of those trains are not very frequent at all outside the 9-5 commute pattern.

bob_theslob6465• 1 year ago

Well it depends because they added the Grand Central line so that you can get from the middle of Manhattan to Queens fairly quickly as Grand Central stop at Jamaica station on the Long Island railroad which is a hack to getting to JFK without having to use the Subway.

AbstractH24• 1 year ago

I love it, but as someone who lives in Queens I think it’s underestimating by maybe 20% or 30%, particularly when a transfer or significant walking is involved (and I walk quite fast)

cooljacob204• 1 year ago

Yeah, I wish I could get from Astoria to Forest Hills in only 40 minutes.

amelius3• 1 year ago

There seems to be a bug:

Click on Howard beach (JFK Airport), then on Broad Channel. The times are not updated.

dave3332• 1 year ago

But how long does it take to get to Mornington Crescent?

dave3332• 1 year ago

Assuming multi-modal travel is allowed of course.

jeffbee• 1 year ago

Apparently you can walk to North Brother Island in 20 minutes from 138th St.

standardUser• 1 year ago

I'm curious how the creator chose 40 minutes as the cutoff because I use the same cutoff. Less than 40 minutes is normal, ordinary, wouldn't think twice about it. More than 40 minutes is an outrage, preposterous, is this place even still in NY?

ourmandave• 1 year ago

This feels like a question you would ask if you were a level designer for a zombie video game.

TZubiri• 1 year ago

Logistically, space is not euclidean.

cyberax• 1 year ago

Yeah. Isochrones are great, because they clearly show the inferiority of ANY type of public transit to cars.

OfCounsel• 1 year ago

FYI, the average speed of a car in midtown Manhattan is under 5mph. The subway is 17mph.

skirge• 1 year ago

does it include going to subway station ("total time of travel")

vanilla_nut• 1 year ago

This is absolutely wonderful. As a former resident of Astoria and soon-to-be Brooklyn resident, I noticed something that becomes pretty obvious quickly to NYC residents: literally all of Queens (except perhaps LIC) is over 40 minutes from the vast majority of Brooklyn by subway. When I lived in Astoria, it was literally faster to _walk_ than to try to take the subway (with weekend delays and redirections and schedules) to most of Brooklyn.

We really need the Interborough Express (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Express) 50 years ago.

jimt1234• 1 year ago

Hmmm. I've made it from Jamaica Station (coming from Long Island) to Yankee Stadium in under 40 minutes many times.

yownie• 1 year ago

anyone remember this from the 2000's when it was called triptropnyc ?

https://www.triptropnyc.com/

shmuppet• 1 year ago

An interesting offshoot of this type of question is: how long does it take to hit every stop on a given transit system? BART has quite a few people making attempts; the official BART website even maintains a little article [1]! A couple have made videos of attempts and theory [2, 3], but the king of these things is tomo tawa linja, who I believe is the current record holder at 5:30:26 [4].

[1] https://www.bart.gov/news/fun/speedrun

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o9JGsamQF0

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFWp_LH3X5k

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmQTnSlL4C4

yackback• 1 year ago

The NYC version has a wikipedia page[0]. The record is Kate Jones, in 22 hours, 14 minutes, 10 seconds.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subway_Challenge

compsciphd• 1 year ago

The data doesn't make sense to me, at least if it doesn't take into consideration transfers (which are very erratic from my experience).

Ex: The A in general goes express from 125th to 59th st without any stops. Therefore, one would think those stations should be sort of disconnected from each other (sort of islands in the the graph), but the data as presented shows them with a simple gradual extension of time.

makes me wonder about its accuracy in general.

dtgriscom• 1 year ago

I loved the domain name, once I figured out it was a reference to "watersheds".

danvk• 1 year ago

We built a visualization along these lines at Sidewalk Labs back in 2017. It's open source if you're interested in playing around with it: https://github.com/sidewalklabs/router

I particularly liked the multimodal comparison feature. It lets you answer questions like "where does the bus help me get to faster than the subway?" (Answer: basically nowhere.)

kazinator• 1 year ago

Unsurprisingly, next to nothing is reachable in 40 minutes that is not tightly packed next to the subway system.

From any subway station, you can reach, in forty minutes, a large swath of the subway system and its small vicinity.

drusepth• 1 year ago

What is the search bar for (that populates with other cities)? I tried both SF and Seattle and both just move the map ~50 miles away from NYC.

Does this only visualize NYC, or does it also work elsewhere?

snapplebobapple• 1 year ago

this is cool but it would pe super interesting to see this adjusted for the ilterva\ timing betweenarrivals assumild i got to station rightafter each train left: all of the area difference is the questionable territory risky to ride from each station unless you have flexibility

How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in NYC?

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