Mapping Hacks

The New York subway map fascinates me with missing pieces. Why should it be so hard to get from Queens to Brooklyn, without going through Manhattan or, off-peak, waiting an hour for a slow old G train? (The G line is the only one that doesn’t pass through Manhattan along its length, and has suffered from concomitant underservice and neglect.)

Who would want to travel on public transit from Brooklyn to Queens anyway? ask the bemused, dry locals. Everything of interest in the five boroughs is going to, or coming from, Manhattan. Besides, there’s the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and everyone drives, right? But I still wondered about this ‘dead zone’ on the subway map, the lack of connectedness between the two proximate outer boroughs, and how this came to be and still obtains.

I caught some clues in the overlong but fascinating biography of Robert Moses i’d read recently. Patterns that i understand are common to post-Depression, post-war American cities; the ripping out of the tram or trolley-car networks through a combination of cost economies and pressure from the automobile manufacturing lobbies. In New York, specific problems: Moses’ monopolisation of toll revenues that could have gone to support public transit rather than highway construction; and the closure and partial destruction of the Elevated Railway Lines, or the Els, a prototypical urban light railway system.

The New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn was worth a visit, though i was rather disappointed by the bland information design and not into the childrens-playgroud feel of the back half, or the fetishisation of tokens and turnstiles. I was gripped by an elegiac exhibit about the Els; photographs of “el streets”, with a distinctive mesh of shops serving the street-level exits and entrances. The Moses book had mentioned the effect that the slatted railway, that filtered in light and provided shade, so different from that of a solid elevated freeway.

Some of the els were destroyed, others became the fabric and the route of the subway system that followed them. Looking at their original route map, i found one of my missing pieces; an elevated light railway which once ran straight from downtown Brooklyn through to Queens. Now, the two loops belong to different subway lines, cut off from each other, their midsection cut through by the BQE.

Supporting and intersecting the Els was a tram or trolley network than ran throughout Brooklyn and Queens. Many streets are discernibly ex-cable-car streets. Along one block south along Lorimer from Union, the asphalt is sunken and torn away in the centre of the road. Stretches of the old rails are visible, embedded in the cobblestones. The lost light rail of Brooklyn is still perhaps accessible underground. A lot of the infrastructure of the Els is now part of the subway system.

Here is a template for something that grew organically, and worked well. There is some angst in the stories of these maps; the death of the Els; the marginalisation and deracination inflicted on some parts of Brooklyn by the elevated freeways. But there’s hope that the proto-infrastructure might be fit for future purpose. Rebuilding some of the lost light rail might answer future traffic planning problems.

I used the new release of QGIS to georeference the trolley car line map, which was pretty spatially correct. Schuyler, more familiar with the territory, helped me pick out six clearly identifiable intersections which i got the coordinates of from geocoder.us. Then i used the v.digit program in GRASS GIS to trace the lines, after some unsuccessful attempts to vectorise them automatically. The resulting shape file, a bit rough in places, and georeferenced base files are available as is a more detailed howto is in-progress. I’m also working on a model of the Els.

People fetishise subways in their cities, Londoners or New Yorkers; public money is poured into them. Light Rail is price-compared to expansion of conventional large-scale bus systems, even ones faked up to look like trams; rather than to subways of which light rail is a much closer functional equivalent.

Express subways with dedicated bicycle space and free transfer to small-scale local bus systems still make sense. Central urban subways as they are - huge maintenance costs, old stations hundreds of metres apart, looming security and safety concerns - don’t really make sense.

The Second Avenue Subway has lain unfinished for more than seventy years.

NYCSubway.org is a goldmine of historical map data and modern schematic maps, and i enjoyed wondering round it greatly. Transportation Alternatives has a lot of interesting bicycle map data, which i’ll spend some time with if i can’t get my hands on the GIS data for the Bicycle Master Plan.

After reading this, hex pointed me at Toronto’s Transit
Ghosts, a lost light rail tracking effort in Canada.

Posted in brooklyn |

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