Transportation
The Best Maps We've Seen of Sandy's Transit Outage in New York
How transit access changes the perception of distance and accessibility of resources in a city.
By now, tales of Hurricane Sandy’s impact on the New York City transit system have been widely and well told. The storm managed, with awe-inspiring force, to sever the subway arteries of the largest city in America. And just as impressively, New York managed to bail out the water and get moving again.
But we were struck recently by a pair of novel images of the city before and after its transportation network fell into disarray. These two maps come courtesy of the developers behind OpenTripPlanner. This first one, showing the city before the storm, illustrates how accessible each corner of New York was with a typical morning’s use of the transit system: