15 Minute Towns Animated

The 15-Minute City has become one of the most influential ideas in contemporary urban planning. Popularised by urbanist Carlos Moreno, the concept is beautifully simple: cities should be designed so that people can reach the things they need for everyday life - shops, healthcare, schools, green spaces, culture and leisure - within around 15 minutes of where they live, ideally on foot or by bicycle.

The Essentials is an interactive map which asks exactly that question of New York City - and beautifully visualises the answer as an animated pathfinding map. Click anywhere on The Essentials and nine animated lines immediately shoot out from your chosen location, each searching for the nearest example of something that every neighbourhood needs. The map looks for the closest primary healthcare facility, subway station, food retailer, elementary school, park or green space, library, civic centre, sports facility and cultural venue.

The map can calculate exactly how long it would take to reach each of these essential destinations from any point in NYC. And it does so using actual routes rather than simple distances. Walking journeys follow real streets at an assumed speed of 5 km/h, while public transport journeys use observed weekday subway running times and waiting times. Bus schedules are also adjusted using observed bus speeds.

The result is wonderfully intuitive. Click somewhere in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx and the map animates the fastest routes to all nine essentials. A panel then reveals the travel time for each destination and identifies how you would get there. The map tells you exactly how long it takes to reach all nine essentials - so, if you live in Manhattan, you might even discover that you live in a sub-10-Minute City.

The Essentials is just one of a number of tools provided by subway.fyi. These include:

60 Minutes - which uses the same reachability engine as The Essentials. Click anywhere in New York City and the map calculates everywhere you can reach within an hour, creating an interactive, time-based isochrone map based on measured subway travel times rather than simply relying on published schedules.

Live - providing a real-time view of the New York subway, animating every train along its actual track geometry. 

Badness and Awfulness  - these maps combine average waiting times, train bunching and, in the case of the Awfulness map, station ridership to identify the worst places to be stuck waiting for a subway.

Via: Webcurios