🙂 The Emoji Map of Train Delays ☹️

In the classic 1990s management console game Theme Park, visitors’ satisfaction levels were shown through the use of small expressive icons - 🙂☹️. A similar visual cue has been used in Bloomberg's new mapped visualization of train delays on the New Jersey Transit commuter rail service.

In NJ Transit Is NYC’s Least Reliable Commuter Rail — By a Long Shot Bloomberg has mapped a series of smiley-face emojis onto a New Jersey Transit map. Happy, sweating, and sad emojis are used to represent trains that are on time, 10-30 minutes late, and more than 30 minutes late, respectively. The use of expressive smiley emojis on an animated transit map vividly illustrates the levels of delays on different lines during a particularly bad evening commute.

Bloomberg tracked more than 190,000 trains using real-time transit feed data from May through July 2025 to determine that NJ Transit passengers experienced major service disruptions at six times the rate of other commuters on its New York and Connecticut counterparts. The data revealed that there are frequent delays of 15 minutes or more, cancellations, and particularly long delays of 30 minutes or more on NJ Transit trains.

By translating raw delay data into an immediately understandable visual language, Bloomberg’s mapped emoji visualization makes the scale and severity of NJ Transit’s service disruptions as clear as a smiley or sad face emoji.