Benjamin Kabak

An artifact of the subway system pokes through at 57th St. (Photo via flickr user Nicholas Hall)

The subway station at 57th St. and 6th Ave. is an oddity in midtown. Opened in 1968 as part of the massive Chrystie St. project, it served as the northern terminal for the Train to the Plane, a Grand St. shuttle and various other Sixth Ave. locals until 1988 when the 63rd St. station finally opened. Today, it is one of Midtown’s lesser trafficked stations and the system’s 105th most popular station with only 4,237,742 passing through its turnstiles last year, and it plays home to a unique piece of history.

The above image was captured earlier this week, and it shows one of — if not the — system’s last remaining Vignelli maps still on a Transit billboard. While the map is worse for the wear, it appears to be from the mid-1970s, and one Subchatter puts it from 1974. Based on the damage to the map, my guess is that it resurfaced after Transit workers peeled another advertisement off of the board.

In related news, the Design Observer is celebrating Vignelli Week, and as a part of their coverage, they reran a 2004 piece Michael Bierut wrote on the Vignelli map. He offers it up as an ode to the artistry of Vignelli but highlights its shortcomings as a map:

In 1968, Unimark International was commissioned to design a sign system for the subways, and out of this chaos came order. Two Unimark designers, Bob Noorda and Massimo Vignelli, developed a signage plan based on a simple principle: deliver the necessary information at the point of decision, never before, never after. The typeface they recommended, the then-exotic, imported-from-Switzerland Helvetica Medium, was unavailable; they settled for something at hand in the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority train shop called Standard Medium. The designs they proposed assumed that each sign would be held in place at the top with a black horizontal bracket; the sign shop misinterpreted the drawings and simply painted a black horizontal line at the top of each sign. And so the New York City subway signage system was born.

Four years later, Vignelli introduced a new subway map. It was based on principles that would be familiar to anyone who appreciated the legendary London Underground map designed in 1933 by Henry Beck. Out with the complicated tangle of geographically accurate train routes. No more messy angles. Instead, train lines would run at 45 and 90 angles only. Each line was represented by a color. Each stop represented by a dot. What could be simpler?

The result was a design solution of extraordinary beauty. Yet it quickly ran into problems. To make the map work graphically meant that a few geographic liberties had to be taken. What about, for instance, the fact that the Vignelli map represented Central Park as a square, when in fact it is three times as long as it is wide? If you’re underground, of course, it doesn’t matter: there simply aren’t as many stops along Central Park as there are in midtown, so it requires less map space. But what if, for whatever reason, you wanted to get out at 59th Street and take a walk on a crisp fall evening? Imagine your surprise when you found yourself hiking for hours on a route that looked like it would take minutes on Vignelli’s map.

The problem, of course, was that Vignelli’s system logical system came into conflict with another, equally logical system: the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for Manhattan. In London, Henry Beck’s rigorous map brought conceptual clarity to a senseless tangle of streets and neighborhoods that had no underlying order. In New York, however, the orthoginal grid introduced by the Commissioners’ Plan set out its own ordered system of streets and avenues that has become second nature to New Yorkers. Londoners may be vague about the physical relationship of the Kennington station to the Vauxhall station: on the London underground map, Vauxhall is positioned to the northwest of Kennington when it’s actually to the southwest, and it doesn’t seem to bother anyone. On the other hand, because of the simplicity of the Manhattan street grid, every New Yorker knows that the 28th Street number 6 train stops exactly six blocks south and four blocks east of Penn Station. As a result, the geographical liberties that Vignelli took with the streets of New York were immediately noticable, and commuters without a taste for graphic poetry cried foul.

Today, Vignelli’s map is but a museum piece. Out of commission for 31 years, his map still inspires debate about the proper role of a subway map, and those on eBay sell for a pretty penny. Yet, one exists, in bits and pieces, on display for now, in the subway system. Catch it before it’s all gone.

After the jump, a view of this map via Max S. from July. Clearly, Transit has losed an opportunity to preserve some of this bit of New York City subway history. Perhaps the Transit Museum should have stepped in.

I live in an area of Brooklyn rich in transit options. If I want to get into Manhattan, I could take the 2 or 3 from Flatbush Ave. or the B and Q also from Flatbush Ave. I could walk to 4th Ave. and grab the R (and then switch to the D or N one stop later) or I could head south to catch the F at 7th Ave. If I’m going to the Village or Midtown, none of these four rides are that much quicker than any other. How then do I know which ride is the best?

The answer to that question is an easy one for people familiar with the subway system and a complicated one for underground novices. From experience, I know that F and R are the worst options, that the B and Q dump me into Midtown quickly and that the 2 and 3 are usually the best bet. Perhaps someone not used to the system could eliminate the F and R based on the map, but the current subway map doesn’t hold the key to my decisions. That key is frequency.

The 2 and 3 are generally my trains of choice into and out of Brooklyn because of their frequencies. During peak hours, the trains each run every four-to-six minutes during the peak hours, and no train is ever that far behind. The B and Q, on the other hand, each run only every eight-to-ten minutes during peak hours, and thus, the wait is longer. Because it generally takes the same amount of to get to, say, 34th St., it makes sense for me to take the train that arrives more frequently, but only those with a close familiarity with the subway system will know that.

Last month, Jarrett Walker at Human Transit considered the frequency map. He is critical of the way maps do not differentiate between routes based on frequency. “A transit map,” he writes, “that makes all lines look equally important is like a road map that doesn’t show the difference between a freeway and a gravel road.” While my example in this post marks the difference of only a minute or two, Walker’s point applies more to service that runs less frequently than every 15 minutes, bus routes and the way subways and buses can interact. He writes:

I contend that transit agencies have an obligation to push back against that complexity, to make their systems look as simple as possible, to give their citizens (not just their riders) the clearest possible image of how their system works. We may not need this understanding to follow your website’s directions, but it will help us if our trip is disrupted and we have to improvise, and it’s essential if we ever want to feel free to use the transit system spontaneously, for our own purposes.

OK, but how to we decide which routes are “major”?

This question may sound like a recipe for decades of focus groups, but in my experience, the answer may not be so complicated if we just consider the basics: frequency, span of service, speed, reliability and ease of access.

The rest of Walker’s post explores the theory in detail and applies it to the Minneapolis-St. Paul transit system. A few weeks ago, Cap’n Transit offered up his frequency map of Queens’ bus routes. It is a very simple idea that brings clarity to what can be a very confusing aspect of the transit system. Have you ever tried to make heads or tails of the Brooklyn bus map? It’s nearly incomprehensible.

For subway maps — and, in particular, for New York City subway maps, a frequency map could strike at the heart of the current version’s biggest shortfall: It provides a schematic of only peak-hour and midday service. It’s true that the map admits as much in the upper corner, but Transit doesn’t make available a map of weekend or overnight service. The changes — from shuttered lines and shortened routes to express trains making local stops — are significant enough to warrant one. A frequency map would be a great step in the right direction as the subway map would become even more user-friendly.