Baseball fans who go to enough games grow family with the old concessionaire’s adage. You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, the saying goes. Similarly, a subway rider generally can’t navigate the the subway system without a map. Someone going from Point A to Point B needs to know the best way to get there, but how?
Yesterday afternoon, in a discussion on the recent history of New York City’s subway, a discussion broke out on the best way to present a subway system. Should the map be purely schematic and assume that people know the above-ground geometry? Should the map integrate the subway system on a near-accurate geographical representation of the city it services? As New Yorkers used to the geographically integrated subway system, we view those schematic maps suspiciously.
Up above is a thumbnail of our familiar New York City map. Click it to enlarge. As it stands right now, this map has a lot of information on it, and most of it is unnecessary. Boxes about bus connections — with no further information — ring the map, and lines emerge from major subway stops. Staten Island has been moved to abut Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the box in the lower right corner attempts to explain which trains run when. Rush hour, weekdays, evenings, weekends, late nights: read the key and then find your line. It’s almost a game.
Meanwhile, this map also incorporates almost the geography of New York City. Some major through streets are marked, and some — but not all — parks show up on it. As The Local noted a few months ago, Fort Greene Park is nowhere to be found, but the smaller Washington Square Park is front and center near the W 4th St. stop. For those not familiar with New York City, our subway map simply doesn’t help above ground even as it tries to. It makes distances look shorter than they are and omits some landmarks while including others. It’s an approximation of the city at best.
Moving out of the city, we arrive in London to find an entirely different concept of the subway map. The current Tube map, an evolution of a design by Harry Beck, is a diagrammatic map of the Underground. It bears little resemblance to the actual geography of the city and instead presents the system as a series of zones with subway lines running in straight lines or at 45-degree angles. Sparse and simple, it has become a widely recognized symbol of London.
This map helps those who know where they’re going and few others. It gives no indication about distances between stations or about what might be around each station. It’s sometimes better to get off at an early station to reach a destination with a name similar to the next stop, but only those in the know would actually know that. It might look good; it might lend itself to easy imitation; and it might make navigating the subway system itself simple. But it provides no integration into the city.
Since Beck’s design arrived in London, derivatives have become the norm. Take, for example, a look at D.C.’s Metro map or Paris’ schematic. Angles, zones and sparse geographical markers rule the day while New York stands alone as a beacon of graphics design slowly, evolutionarily gone wrong.
So what’s the best map? Maybe New York’s old map — the one that used to show just the subways with a nod toward geography but an understanding that it wasn’t perfect — was the way to go. Vignelli’s map almost fits the bill, but navigating the subway system with it can be a Herculean task. Maybe we’re still just waiting for the right subway map, one that incorporates geography and complicated and convoluted subway systems into an easy-to-use map. Consider it the Holy Grail of subway mapmaking.
33 comments
The KICK map
Once I went there – I can’t see myself using anything else. I would like to see NYC Subway re-interpreted in the style of London, Washington or Paris… Surely someone’s tried? Anyone have a link to share?
Definitely agree that the KICKmap pretty much nails it because it adheres to topography just as well as, and sometimes better than, The Map, but gives a better sense of order to the lines. I also like that it separates out the different services that run on each line, though my only complaint (and it’s petty) is that it sometimes puts the services in non-alphabetical/numerical order to make the design more fluid. On the upsdie, it’s REALLY pretty! http://www.kickmap.com/pages/7.....rison.html
(Though this comparison takes advantage of a lower-resolution image of the official map, which makes the comparison more stark.)
Also, their iPhone app (the paid one) has an awesome night map that shows only the services running late nights, which is something I always thought was needed in New York.
I really hope Walder has seen this map and is open to making it the official map. I swear I have no affiliation with the KICKmap, I just really like good design!
So I have a hard copy of the KICK Map, and it’s definitely a step in the right direction. How is it better than the Vignelli map though? It’s basically the same thing with rounded corners and some more local neighborhood information If that’s all it takes to make the best — in our opinion — subway map, then it probably should be implemented as the map of choice.
The night feature is a good one too. NYC’s subway map used to do that in the mid-1990s when the Manhattan Bridge work resulted in drastically different rush hour service patterns.
I was going to say the same thing about the Kick (is that supposed to be in all caps?) map. It has its good points aesthetically, but also its bad ones (I think four parallel orange lines makes it look really cluttered, for instance), and I don’t see it as being any easier to use for navigation (from the standpoint of tracking actual geography).
“How is it better than the Vignelli map though?”
As Dom mentioned, the topography. It is less abstract. I wouldn’t mind if the MTA gave the Kick Map a try.
I would LOVE the MTA to test the KickMap against their current one! Both to natives and to tourists. Really test it. Let’s see!
Thank for all the comments.
Call me crazy, but I actually don’t see what’s wrong with the current one. When I first moved to New York, I never had any problem navigating the system and figuring out exactly where I was going, which was NOT the case in Boston (and the T has a map just as bad as DC and London)
Admittedly, the T map is also easier to use because so many of the stops are named for easily identifiable places, particularly the Red Line stations, which are almost always named for their squares (Andrew Square, Kendall Sq, Central Sq, Harvard Sq, Porter Sq). The Green Line, except for the D, stays on only one street once it goes above-ground, so you can immediately know that an E-line stop called “Longwood Avenue” is at Longwood and Huntington, etc. The only difficult thing is the Orange Line and the D line, and the D line is really just a miniature commuter train anyhow.
I did OK with the T map even when I didn’t know Boston at all, but I’ve been lately potentially training a trip to London and I’ve found the London Tube map to be outrageously difficult for someone who doesn’t know much about London yet.
The first commenter has a good point. The Kickmap is an excellend alternative:
http://kickdesign.com/mapcompa.....arison.jpg
It gives up some of the geographic “accuracy” for a more schematic-like design, and does a better job of clearly identifying the many lines that run along the same route.
The newest version, which I have on my iPhone, also does a pretty good job of identifying neighborhoods. When I first moved to New York, many years ago, it was a task to learn the West Village from SoHo from Grammercy. The only resource I had was the maps in the back of the taxis at the time, and of course they didn’t show subway lines so you still had to do some guessing.
New York has some unique challenges compared to London or Paris:
First, it has a huge system that gets very concentrated in Manhattan, where the maps are most needed. That means that there is no chance of a truly accurate geographic overlay, or else you would have a very easily readable subway map of Queens with a tiny knot of lines in Manhattan.
Second, the “city center” isn’t in the center. London and Paris can more easily zoom in on the downtown sections and then distort the outer zones, where the stops are further apart, anyway. With Manhattan on the left of the map, and oddly shaped (long and narrow), this sort of schema would not work for New York. This is sort of the flip-side of the first issue.
Third, as already mentioned, the use of multiple lines over a single route, with express and local trains, is a very NYC mapping issue that other systems do not have to deal with (or at least to the same extent). Most underground “lines” are cut and dry.
While the Kickmap is a nice interim step, the only way to really service both locals and visitors in NYC in a way that meshes subway accuracy with accurate geography is to have a virtual map. For four years the only map that I really use has been this Google Maps Mashiup: http://www.onnyturf.com/subway/
It’s great to see the real street map overlaid with exactly where the subway stop is, connected by the familiar colored lines. Google just created their own version in Google Transit. Zoom in and out as needed.
Now the criticism would of course be that this is impractical for tourists and others, and that may be partially true. For now. When I started using this map, if I didn’t reference it while home or at work, then I couldn’t use it. Now, I can access it via my iPhone on the street. Next, someone could build and app for it that would let me take it underground (maybe there is one already). Look at Apple’s new product. “Casual” interactiveness is the future. Within 10 years every tourist will be access interactive maps via such devices and the paper maps that are up in the subway system will be anachronisms.
I wish I could say that they system would have its own interactive maps under glass, but that will never happen. The MTA will use the prevalence of mobile devices as an excuse to eliminate the map budget!
“As it stands right now, this map has a lot of information on it, and most of it is unnecessary.” Oh, really?? Funnily enough, the post does not name one single unnecessary element.
You need to consider who the main audience is. Here is a hint: it’s not people like us. We who live here and use the subway system regularly would probably adjust quickly to just about any map, whether it included geography or not. The question is how useful it is to visitors and those who do not ride the subway often. I strongly suspect that, to them, a map that correlates well with the city’s actual geography, and that includes major landmarks, is beneficial.
I think you also fail to consider that the NYC system is more complex than that of many other cities, with its combinations of express and local trains on the same line, and routes that have different termini or make different stops, depending on the time of day. Wistful comparisons to London and Paris, whose systems are simpler, may be misplaced.
Although everything on the Map serves a purpose, I do agree that it has become too cluttered, mainly due to the addition of bus connections. The average tourist is probably not transferring to a bus, and therefore wouldn’t be terribly disadvantaged if that information were removed.
The Vignelli map was an abomination—artistic, but otherwise useless. No wonder they replaced it. I do like the KICK map, though I would describe it as similar in objective to the current map. It is certainly not a step back towards the Vignelli days.
I guess I wasn’t clear enough but that entire ring of bus line connections that clog up the map but don’t actually say anything about where the bus routes go is a clear example of overkill. The Map would be far easier to read and just as useful without it.
You could also make the case that the map doesn’t need to say which trains stop at every single stop. For example, look at the G line. Does the map have to say “Classon Ave. G”? Of course the G stops there; it’s the only train that runs through that station. There’s already a key in the upper right corner that highlights the difference between express stops (white station indicators) and local-only stops (black indicators). As long as the map somewhere says which trains are express and which are local in which boroughs, littering the map with the same letters and numbers over and over again does nothing.
Finally, the giant box of handicapped accessible stations near the Rockaways is also largely unnecessary because each individual station indicates whether or not it is handicapped accessible. The repetitive information can go.
Now there I agree with you: dropping the ring of bus connections and the extra list of accessible stations would be a big improvement. The little G next to “Classon Avenue” is probably not doing any harm. You and I know the color of the G in our sleep, but someone confronting the subway system for the first time does not.
On the contrary: because trains don’t always have the same local/express patterns, the letters are necessary. It’s much easier to read the letters on the map than to go to the bottom right-hand corner and try to interpret the index.
The advantage of the current map is that it gives you some impression of relative distances. When I can choose multiple routes, this becomes important.
In addition, it usually tells you what street each line runs under. In fact, one of the times I got lost trying to find a station was when I looked for the subway at Lex and 33rd; because the current map isn’t geographical enough, it gives the impression that the Lex line runs under Lex for its full length, instead of going under Park south of 42nd.
The box of accessible stations was far more important 5-8 years ago, when there were an outrageous number of stations that were only accessible in one direction or with only certain accessible lines. Now, that kind of condition is more the exception than the rule, and the only stations that I can think of where only some lines are accessible are Union Square, Times Square, 49th Street N,R,W and 50th St C,E (and as I’ve said before, the Times Square shuttle actually is accessible, I can’t figure out why they say otherwise). Now, I agree that it’s probably duplicative, or could be replaced by info on the handful of stations that are only partially accessible. (by the way – are there any plans to fix 49th St/50th St? It’s quite annoying that I have to take the BMT uptown and IND downtown when I’m going to that part of town).
At the time the box was put in, it was unfortunately very important.
I believe the reason that the 42nd Street Shuttle is not listed as accessible is because of the gap fillers at Times Square. Also, I’m not sure about the slope of the passageway at the Grand Central end, but I’m pretty sure the gap fillers are what “disqualify” it. This would have been fixed in the planned rebuilding of the shuttle station, but I think that is on indefinite hold due to both funding (of course) and trying to finalize the plan.
I’d like it if the MTA stopped printing the abbreviation ‘St’ on every station with “Street” in its name. Wouldn’t “125” do just as well as “125th St”?
But would tourists know it’s 125th St and not 125th Ave? As Marc said above, the primary audience for the map is tourists, not the people who ride everyday and know all the stops already.
The KICK Map is great because it shows all of the subway lines — it takes one thinking step away from the typical map. By picturing the subway lines themselves, when a weekend service change dictates “Coney Island-bound N trains run on the D from 36 St to Stillwell Av” you can actually see exactly where that train will stop.
That said, the KICK Map isn’t an enormous leap forward, but rather a fairly useful step up.
I consider myself a New Yorker who remains updated about service changes and knows the Manhattan subway system pretty well, but frankly I’m still working on memorizing the trains in the boroughs. Lately I’ve found myself headed to unfamiliar areas in Brooklyn and Queens to visit friends (which usually requires a transfer) and on the weekends/late nights I’m nearly always subjected to insane service changes that are nearly baffling. I cross my fingers and hope it works out.
I know subwayweekender helps in this regard, but the MTA needs to embrace a similar strategy to help straphangers figure out the system when service changes take over. If I have trouble with it, there’s NO way a tourist would be able to figure it out.
I gotta agree – I could draw most of the Manhattan subway map from memory, but even I get scrambled in Lower Manhattan when the lines start crossing over each other, and I’m just not really familiar with the lines in Queens and the Bronx since I’m not usually up there. With as many lines and subway stations as we have, I doubt there are many people who don’t work within the MTA who can really say that they never need a map.
I’d prefer for St, Av, etc to be left in, otherwise it looks incomplete and unprofessional (like the “CH’MB’RS” signs that used to be posted on columns that couldn’t fit the entire station name).
But in line with Ben’s comment about the specific tagging of a station on the “G” line as a stop for the “G” train, this is where KickMap’s beauty really shines. Follow the route line and you’ll know where the train stops.
I think what differs this city from the others is not the multiple routes on one line, but the parallel nature of the lines. If I want to go to 6th Ave and 9th St, do I want to take the 6th Av line and walk north or south, the 7th Ave line and walk east, or the Broadway line and walk west (or take the PATH)? With the hub/spoke layout of other cities, it’s much easier to choose a line to take.
One more thing… the best MTA Transit navigation tool that I use for mobile devices is HANDS DOWN Exit Strategies application (http://www.exitstrategynyc.com). I’m not affiliated but I just love the app. Obviously, it shows where to stand on the train so you can transfer or exit at your destination most efficiently. This is incredibly helpful.
But each subway station on the map is clickable, and you can look at the “neighborhood map” around the station that shows not only every street in the area, but also shows the exact locations of subway station stairwells. Immensely useful. Easily the best $5 I’ve ever spent. Blending the neighborhood maps with the full subway map is the perfect solution.
AND as a kicker, the app has a full MTA bus map for each borough.
Still, it does NOT help when service changes come into play.
The Kickmap is the best option. I have a hard copy on my wall that I use when I need a subway map and I bought the app for my phone. It’s just incredibly legible, I can instantly answer any question I might have with out having to decipher anything. The night map is really helpful. In terms of representing geography and exhibiting high quality graphic design, it really outdoes both the current map and the Vignelli one (the Vignelli map is prettier, but I think the Kickmap is more legible.) By aligning things, showing routes at 45 degree angles, and most crucially, showing each service as a different line, the Kickmap far outdoes the current one.
One of the big ideas of the Kickmap (and the Vignelli map) is that it only shows subway information. This is great because that’s all the information most people really want. I think the Kickmap would be best served by having a geographically accurate map posted right next to it. This map would show the whole city with bus and subway information accurately. If they partner up with NJ Transit and the Port Authority, they can show services to PABT, Hudson County and downtown Newark.
If you look at how NYCDOT presents the bike map at the new bike parking shelters, I don’t think it would be that difficult to do for the transit services in the city. The bike map proves that the whole city and most of Hudson County can fit geographically accurately on one large piece of paper. Dividing up the bus information by borough always seemed arbitrary and patronizing to me for some reason.
(PS: Every map ever made always shows the Broadway line station at Canal St as one stop. If I had my way, the Canal St station connecting to the bridge would be right next to the Canal St stations for the JMZ and 6. The Bway local Canal station would be off to the left with a line connecting it to the others.)
I agree that not every station needs the train names right after it. There’s a brightly-colored line running from that station to the next station. Nobody is looking to compare letters. The London map doesn’t say “Picadilly” after every Picadilly Line stop.
And those letters aren’t even reliable. 81st St / Natural History is “B-C”. Except that half the time neither of those trains stop there and it’s just an A stop. Misinformation is worse than no information at all.
So I don’t often feel this way but I really disagree with most of the premises of this post and I seem to disagree with most of the posters other than perhaps Erik. Now some of this opinion might be colored by the fact that I’m a born and raised New Yorker from the 80’s, but to me the Vignelli map, though lovely, lacks function and maps such as the Underground map and say Tokyo’s Metro map are pretty much equally so. The kick map though preserves the geography, it actually is even more Manhattan centric in geographic distortion than “The Map” does and it sadly eliminates what to me, though apparently not to most of the posters here believe, is one of the greatest strengths of “The Map”, the trunking of lines. To me the Kick map is simply too cluttered by separating out the lines. My preference of map now is simply using google with transit being overlayed. And when people say that “The Map” makes things look closer than they are I laugh, because it only does this for the outer boroughs, but for Manhattan it does precisely the opposite. I have traveled many subways through out the world and in my experience the two things that NYC has over all other transit systems is the 24×7 service and “The Map”. It is important to find a happy medium between form and function, but some times function can be equally beautiful to any amount of aesthetic adornment.
I remember the utter confusion of both natives and tourists when the Vignelli map was introduced. Tourists would stare for a while and invariably turn around to ask someone. At the time I bought a Hagstom subway map with it’s clear geographical markers for my runner’s job.
Most of the praise for that map came from people who never rode the subway. Elegant and useless it was truly a triumph of form over function.
While today’s map can be cleaned up, it is the result an evolution *toward* usefulness. It may not be a favorite of map geeks and gallery goers but I’ve watched it do the job for natives and tourists every day.
Now if only it could be placed somewhere in the car that doesn’t involve looking through someone’s head.
but the only thing about London’s map is that if you are a tourist, and you’re trying to go “North of Oxford” then you would have no idea? It seems like a little geography helps.
It is very important in England to use the qualifyer Street, Circus, etc after the name as we may have several streets or places. It is in the same way that you may have an 8th Street and an 8th Avenue. ‘North of Oxford’ to me means a point north of Oxford, a city 40 miles North West of London. ‘North of Oxford Street’ would mean north of the one mile long street of that name, running between Marble Arch and Tottenham Court Road on the Central (red) line. ‘North of Oxford Circus’ would be a much more precise location meaning north of the junction named Oxford Circus formed by the intersection of Oxford Street and Regent Street. This is midway along Oxford Street.
The map that Beck created, and has evolved through time, serves a number of different roles. It has never pretended to be geographically correctly, in fact almost intentionally not. It started life at a time when the Underground system was expanding rapidly into the suburbs. By removing the geography it helped to sell travel by Underground to people who would otherwise, in their mind, have thought that Central London was too far away for them to travel. At that time the furthest point on the system was Aylesbury, 30 or so miles North West of the centre on the Metropolitan Line (purple).
Whilst the map suffers from not being able to show how near or far some places are to each other it has enabled many people to create a mental map for then to work from. There is a central reference point – the River Thames. When this was taken out last year the was a big outcry and the Mayor had it put back again.
The Map *does* include Ft. Greene Park. In fact, it’s right there on the version included in your post! (The abbreviated subway map on the MTA website doesn’t, but that’s not the same as The Map.)
I like some of the approach of the KICK map but don’t like the color scheme at all. This is probably purely a matter of taste. But really, the current map would be fine if they just took out the bus information.
I’ve thought of how I’d design a NY subway map and may give it a try sometime. I’ve thought of this basic approach:
1. Portray each line separately, like the KICK map, but using thinner lines (using thinner lines would allow for more geographical accuracy).
2. Portray each line differently depending on if it runs all the time, including late nights and weekends, or doesn’t run late nights, doesn’t run weekends, or runs only during rush hour. I’m thinking of a solid line with a black border for trains -like the 6- that pretty much run all the time. You can catch a 6, or a 4 or 5 running on the 6 line and making 6 stops, at 3 on Sunday morning but this is not the case with many, maybe most, lines. A train that runs all days, including weekends, but not late nights would be a solid line with a white border. A train that doesn’t run weekends would be shown as a series of dashes, and a train that only runs rush hours would be shown as a series of dots.
For example, on the Lexington Avenue line, the 6 would be a solid green line with a black border. The 4 and 5 would be solid green lines with white borders in Manhattan, but the 5 would become a series of dashes in Brooklyn. Since the lines themselves are treated differently, there is no need to space them far enough or make them thick to distinguish them.
And no bus or SIR information, though you might want to show at least the NYC portion of the PATH and the various commuter trains. Now the bus map is the one that needs a pretty radical redesign.
The Vignelli map, while beautifully simple, ignored one well-known trait about a good portion of Manhattan – its streets are in a rigid grid. And when you heavily distort a fixed grid, it becomes confusing. Paris and London can get away with it because their streets aren’t as orderly.
The Kick Map does combine the ‘mildly distorted’ MTA map with the angular, straightforward route approximation of Vignelli’s, as well as separate lines for each route, which I always felt was one great part of Vignelli’s map. I think the MTA’s map is due for a major overhaul.
Flat panels on new subway cars with changing maps (based on time of day) would be a HUGE improvement, as well.
[…] as I’ve written in the past, the New York City Transit Authority and later the MTA have struggled to balance the purpose and design of the subway map with geography first taking a back seat to design and, more recently, design falling behind […]
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