Making a Subway Map XII

 

I wrote:

Once I add Newark Airport, I'm done drawing lines!

OK, well, here's that:

Not much to it. Actually, I also moved the diagonal (just barely seen at upper left) of the Raritan Valley line a little upward to make this fit and keep station D3 above North Elizabeth station.

By the way all the examples this week are at 200% size.



Supposedly that would be the last lines drawn, but it wasn't. I took a look back at some of the earliest portions I drew and I wanted to space out the stations better. My concern was a few areas that looked more crowded than other later portions of the diagram.

The first target was the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I decided the Broadway line (red) and Eighth Avenue line (orange and dark blue) were too close together and that shifting the Broadway line to the left would improve two diagonals.

Here's the area running from 50th St to 72nd St. I think it looks better now.

It almost looks stretched up and down, but it isn't. 59th St and Columbus Circle stations are slightly lower than before, and the distance to 66th St and 72nd St looks greater because the diagonal is longer.

This also shows the new dashed line treatment for sections under construction, on the purple line west of Times Square.

The same shift improves the diagonal of the dark blue line between 145th St and 168th St.

That always looked a little crowded to me. Now it makes sense.



There's another area in the Bronx that I didn't like the looks of. It's the combined red and green lines from Jackson Ave to 241st St. I didn't want to stretch it vertically, which meant the only way to make to open space was to create some diagonals. Such diagonals were justified by the real routing of the lines. The solution I have adopted adds five curves, which I am not completely happy about, but I do like the result and I will probably go with it.

Optical illusion: it looks as if I stretched it left and right, but I didn't. The grey railroad lines you see have not moved at all, except for a slight move of the diagonal through Botanical Garden station.

The first diagonal from the bottom, Jackson Ave to Simpson St, starts to open up the distance between stations. The next jiggle to the right tends to set off the important station at East 180th St, and also allows opening up the distance between stations from Bronx Park East to Gun Hill Road.



Here's the entire diagram as it is now, much too small to read, just to show the overall layout.

That's it for this week. I needed to get all the lines final before I try to draw water features, which will be next.



Continued: Subway Map XIII.