They tried to build a single system that works for everyone, and it works kind of okay unless you're on the edge of a bell curve, geographically speaking.
Compared to paper maps, Google Maps also looks like shit in the USA.
Maybe I'm just an old fart, but "usability" of apps seems to be going down everywhere. For example, making "near" user-definable would be an easy fix, and I don't think it would cause any implementation problems on the mapping side, would it?
I notice feature after feature like this these days, where something has been implemented, but it isn't useful due to lack of attention to detail.
It's not unreasonable to expect a map to behave differently in the middle of a major city than a more rural area.
Unlike NY, in Atlanta everything is a 30 minute drive so convenience is less about distance.
I hadn't put it into words before, but the problem you describe hits home. I want a 20-30 minute radius of search results, not things limited to the nearest mile. That's worthless in Atlanta.
But today? I think I could easily live in the midtown area and not need my car. I mean, I'd walk to Whole Foods from 10th and Piedmont regularly (there's a shortcut at the TJs ;P)
Tangent: I used to walk on the weekends from my apartment on 123 & Lex, to the 125 street A, take it up to 175th, walk a block over, get on the GW, walk across, then hike down to Hoboken, PATH back to Manhattan, and walk back up town until my legs gave out. Depending on where I stopped , I would either subway or lyft back to my apartment.
It allowed me to experience NJ which I would never have done. And I found places to get my hair cut for < $30, which was more than half off from my local barber, and clothes were tax free, which was TONS better than tax free under $100, etc. I learned so much traveling into NJ regularly, and eventually moved there.
I always found NYC specific travel funny. For example, it can take an hour an a half to get from the Upper West Side to Brooklyn but a bus ride from NYC to somewhere like Philly is often under 2 hours.
They frequently list delays when there are none and don't list them when the subway is running very behind. I wonder if it's just hard to get this kind of real-time data from MTA.
It's really an MTA problem, though. You can tell because they now have screens with arrival times everywhere. Even if the screen says that a E train is coming in 11 minutes, one moment later the same train (another E train?) is just two minutes away, if not approaching the platform. Perhaps they only need to recalibrate the code that comes up with the estimates, since the beacon system is fairly recent.