The comments about the "old" map (not the original Italian one, the one we all have a hardcopy of on our bookshelves) being unreadable strike me as a little off. Maps are always going to be contextual, and a mark of a "good" map in my mind has always been if, after a certain amount of time using it, you no longer have to rely on it. Having spent a lot of time in New York, traveling there when I was younger and now for business but never living there for longer than a summer, the "old" map served this purpose pretty well. Maybe it was a little hostile to the user, but this sort of encourages you to just straight up memorize things. This isn't to say the maps should be hostile as a means to makes people memorize its contents, rather that this one was maybe "just usable enough that tourists can get around" and "just hostile enough that people who use the subway a lot would just memorize things". Traveling from JFK to Grand Central and then up to Columbia became muscle memory after the second trip.