I love the London tube map, but when I lived there, it was all the more useful to me because I look at other maps so that I could know that certain stations were in easy walking distance from each other or some other place I was going to.
Canonical answer: Queensway to Bayswater
Tube route: Queensway → Notting Hill Gate change train Notting Hill Gate → Bayswater The journey time between these two London underground stations is approximately 15 minutes
Or just walk. It takes 2 minutes.
I guess that when your abstraction is at the level of start station and end station, that is where the value of the tube map is.
https://project.wnyc.org/transit-time/#40.75014,-73.93048,12...
https://www.mapnificent.net/newyork/#12/40.7290/-73.9980/900...
It’s easy to imagine zooming in and using the colors for a 10 minute Subway/walkability combo for e.g. restaurant finding.
In terms of solving real problems, I don't see it as functionally any better than a list ordered by distance with a small compass showing directionality. Basically what you see on the left when you search google maps for "pizza in san francisco".
The benefit of that list is that it uses space much more efficiently and can show things like ratings and thumbnails. Whereas in the article's ui, you have to click on every circle to see what it is.
Put another way, maps are incredibly information dense but when you remove most of the information from them, they're just dense.
What problems are (NOT (young, single, white, male, developer, in San Francisco)) trying to solve?
What is the Venn diagram of those problem sets? The market size? The impact?
If aiming to build a business that works outside the Silicon Valley bubble, you can go wildly wrong by designing for, appealing to, and getting traction in the tiny set.
People do think about space and the environment in spatial terms and also in time. This article is basically replaying the same failure that Google is showing - that maps only have an economic value. "Pizza in San Francisco" has been a meme in geospatial hacker land for over a decade and this is another incarnation of it. People think about space in non economic terms more than in terms of how to sell stuff via advertisements. We think about safety, attractiveness, how accessible it is, whats the parking like, who we are with, where next we are going to, what is the ambiance like, how will it be when we try to get home, crime levels, any nearby arts and events on, is the football on at the stadium, is it a weekday or a weeknight, is it near a university, is it during term time, what kind of people are nearby, are the streets well lit, how noisy are the streets. etc. etc.
Now - this doesn't discount the work. I think that a 2D map - the paper analogy onto digital form also isn't good, so any research and attempt to think about what's good and working is worth looking at. Care should be taken when giving psychological or psychogeographical points to such different designs.