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Looking at the 1978 subway map[1], I better appreciate the improvements since. It seems less daunting to someone who's never visited NYC yet.

[1] https://www.nycsubway.org/perl/caption.pl?/img/maps/calcagno...

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That’s not an official map. This was:

https://www.nycsubway.org/perl/caption.pl?/img/maps/system_1...

The point was to give perspective to the redesigned map.

Its stunning how geographically incorrect that map is. I can't believe the MTA/NYCTA/whatever would ever approve such a map.

That’s a topic of a lot of discussion by transit planners. For example:

https://humantransit.org/2013/11/should-transit-maps-be-geog...

> The geographic map helps you locate yourself and points of interest in the city, but you need the structure map to understand how the system works.

A subway map is only incidentally supposed to be geographically correct. It needs to be basically a graph diagram, ideally with distances weighted by travel time.

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