Lost? New York Pedestrian Maps Are Coming...

Below is a New York Times article about how the NYC Transportation Department is installing a network of over 400 pedestrian maps around city streets. Everett Studios is manufacturing the maps. That entails printing each map graphic onto a clear adhesive film and mounting it to the back of tempered glass about six feet tall with varying widths. Once we add security hardware, they are shipped to the Transportation Department for installation.

It is the local traveler’s private shame — all-consuming as the numbered streets disappear, or at the top step of an unknown subway exit, or maybe a half block away from the station, at the unfamiliar intersection where the truth is inescapable.

You are a New Yorker. Your inner compass has betrayed you. You, dare say it, may even be lost. 

On Monday, the city announced a possible remedy for the uncertain: a new, $6 million network of pedestrian maps, oriented in the direction that the viewer is facing — so that someone looking east from Lower Manhattan, for instance, might find the Brooklyn Bridge at the top of the display.

The maps, to be installed on sidewalks and inside subway stations, will include the locations of transit hubs and bike lanes, as well as estimated walking times for pedestrians.

By summer’s end, about 100 of the maps will be installed, according to the Transportation Department, with plans to expand citywide over the next year. 

“We all know that feeling of being turned around,” Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner, said at a news conference beside a newly installed map in Chinatown. 

A department study, based on a survey of 500 pedestrians, found that one-third of New Yorkers could not say which direction north was. Fourteen percent of residents and 27 percent of visitors could not name the neighborhood or borough in which they were being surveyed. And nearly 10 percent of locals admitted they had gotten lost in the previous week. 

“There is a clear need for this system,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said. 

Midtown Manhattan; Prospect Heights, Brooklyn; and Long Island City, Queens, are among the other neighborhoods set to receive maps during the program’s introduction this summer. The maps can already be found on the more than 300 bike-share kiosks installed in Manhattan below 59th Street and in parts of Brooklyn. And the Metropolitan Transportation Authority plans to replace its network of neighborhood maps — posted in each station near the turnstiles — with a version of the new maps. 

Beside a station entrance at Canal Street on Monday, examples of subway dislocation persisted. Riders reached street level, fumbling for their phones (and the maps they supplied) before making their first moves. Others turned sharply as they exited, then doubled back to reconsider. 

A survey of 10 New Yorkers, conducted near Centre and Canal Streets — where no numbered street signs could be consulted — suggested that the Bloomberg administration’s data may even overstate the city’s collective sense of direction. 

Four respondents correctly identified which direction was north on their first try. Two pointed south, one pointed east, and one could not hazard a guess. The remaining two pointed west, including one man who consulted a compass app on his smartphone before guessing. 

“This way,” the man, Eric Rahman, said in front of the small gift shop he operates, stretching an arm along Canal Street, as his app seemed to instruct. 

He was informed of his mistake. “Hold on,” he said, punching at the phone again.

The city might be wise to install the maps in front of his shop, if only to give a second opinion. Mr. Rahman said he often helped passers-by who asked for directions.