This map visualizes the amount of time that it takes to travel from station to station in the Boston subway by distorting geographical distance according to these times. We used the Spatial Deform command in Grasshopper to distort the map, using the original subway lines from GIS as the syntax (the original points before the deformation) and using C# to write a definition that would allow us to scale those original subway lines according to the times that it took to get from station to station, starting from downtown Boston out into the different areas the subway goes to. The C# definition ensured that the scale would happen in the same direction as the stations were placed relative to one another originally. We got the times from an MBTA app at 9am on a weekday. We made them into a csv file that then could get read in Grasshopper as the scale of the subway lines.

Although the original map did not take the form we were expecting (we wanted more of a D'arcy Thompson's deformation diagram type of distortion) it was a great exercise to get into different Grasshopper commands and C#. We would have liked the final map to have stretched and compressed more according to the subway line distort/scale, but we ended up with some 'kinks' that resulted from the points pulling only in very small areas of the map rather than stretching the entire area around it. However, we do like that you see the general trend of the Green lines being very slow and the eastern lines (Orange, Blue) being generally faster. This could be used as a map to inform yourself before settling into a certain area in the city or renting/buying a new place.