The New York City subway map has always been tricky to decipher. Unlike those in cities from Boston to London to Tokyo, the longstanding New York map hews fairly closely to the image of the city aboveground.
Central Park is clearly depicted, as are the individual bodies of water within it; you can see the shape of each borough and the rivers and ocean framing them. Overlaid across it all is a tangled web of subway lines, daunting to the first-time visitor – especially when it comes to distinguishing between local and express trains.
