Subway Maps

Michael Hertz’s 1979 original. Click to enlarge.

Michael Hertz, one of the lead designers of the current subway map, passed away last month at the age of 87. The Brooklyn native passed away in East Meadow, Long Island, and his map will long survive him. He unified the subway routes, giving single colors to each trunk line, and helped move the city beyond the controversial Vignelli Era. The Times published a touching obituary last week, and I wanted to wax nostalgic about my interactions with Hertz nearly a decade ago.

In late 2010, the Museum of the City of New York hosted a panel on subway map design. At the time, Massimo Vignelli’s diagrammatic map was enjoying a period of rediscovery and appreciation. It had been 30 years since the MTA had moved on from the controversial map, but map experts and designers praised its clarity and simplicity. The panel included Massimo Vignelli, John Tauaranc, Eddie Jabbour and historian Paul Shaw, and I wrote it up for a post. A funny thing happened after that post.

Tauranac, you see, was one of the designers of the 1979 map, but he wasn’t the lead designer. That honor went to Michael Hertz, the named partner behind the design firm the MTA tasked with updating the subway map. A few days after that panel, I received an email from Hertz. He and Tauranac had often publicly feuded over the creation of the 1979 map, and Hertz was upset that he had not been invited to speak to the panel. So I gave him the floor for a few posts.

A prototype of the Hertz map featured trunk lines that were all red with multi-colored bullets designating train routing.

Hertz was 77 at the time, and the map his firm designed had been a part of the MTA lexicon for three decades. It still survives today, now known as The Map, with tweaks Hertz Associates implemented in the late 1990s, some for better and some for worse. It’s by far the subway map that’s been in use in NYC the longest, and while it’s not perfect, it has persisted. Hertz’s map doesn’t always know if it wants to be a diagram or a geographical representation of the city, and the station labels are placed at funny angles, overlapping lines in the denser parts of Lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn (flaws Vigenlli himself highlighted in a 2012 talk). Still, whether through bureaucratic inertia or a belief that it’s a useful tool in the arsenal of transit directions, Hertz’s map is now an enduring part of New York.

Hertz Associates came up with the idea of identifying subway routes by their Manhattan trunk lines, despite branching elsewhere. These Pantone colors are still in use today.

After our email exchange, Hertz wrote a free-flowing series of posts both defending his map and explaining it. In Part One, he started out with a vigorous defense of The Map and his neighborhood inserts (and threw some shade at casual designers who did not have to answer to clients). Part Two tackled the Vigenlli Era. Hertz spoke glowingly of the Vignelli diagram but detailed why New Yorkers had such a visceral reaction to it. Part Three was a fascinating look at the MTA’s late-1970s visitors guide and the decision to introduce trunk lines by color to the map, and Part Four ended with a discussion on those colors. Hertz had expressed a desire to continue the series, but the modern history of the map never materialized.

I’ve also been partial to the current redesign of the Vignelli map. It incorporates Hertz’s trunk line color scheme while addressing some of the earlier complaints about Vignelli’s confusing diagram. The water is now blue, but without parks or other landmarks, it’s very much diagram. Still, I’ve grown to appreciate Hertz’s map over the years too. The decision to go with trunk lines helped simplify the map for every-day users even while leading to confusion for tourists and other occasional riders. Still, his map is very much of and about New York. The city is identifiable, and the routes of the subway are too. The 1979 version is cleaner and crisper with whiter whites (rather than beige) and colors that seem to pop more,

When the MTA unveiled their latest iteration of the subway map a few years ago, they did so with a caveat. The confusing service status box, detailing various changes at different times of day, disappeared, and the map was intended to represent peak-hour and midday service during the week only. A short-lived Night Map was available, depicting overnight service, and weekend changes are handled via signage and The Weekender. Last week, though, the status box made a triumphant and streamlined, albeit still flawed, return.

As many have noted and as I photographed last week, in addition to the reopened Montague St. Tunnels, the September printing of the subway map also contains a new guide to weekend and overnight service. Using subway bullets and better descriptors, the guide presents information in an easy-to-digest format. It lacks information — such as when these so-called “late night” service patterns begin — that isn’t readily available in the system. For some reason, the MTA hasn’t been keen to announce last trains on routes that don’t run 24 hours or when exactly, say, the D train will start running local in Brooklyn. That’s just something regular riders pick up, and the new feature doesn’t cover the gap.

Still, this is a welcome return of an old feature that shouldn’t have gone away in the first place. It’s not perfect, but it’s information that people need to ride. Otherwise, they may find themselves simply too confused by the subway map to make heads or turns of our ostensibly complicated network. Don’t believe me? Just talk to Bim Adewunmi instead.

If this looks familiar to some, it’s because this is a story I covered via an Instagram posting a few days ago but didn’t have a chance to write up until now. Follow Second Ave. Sagas on Instagram for more sights and scenes from the city’s subways.

New neighborhood maps designed by Pentagram are centered around the station in which they hang. (Photo via New York City Transit)

Massimo Vignelli’s original vision for subway wayfinding involved three pieces — a schematic map, a guide to subway service and a geographically accurate neighborhood map for immediate navigation aboveground. At various points in time, these elements all caught on but not at once when the late designer introduced the concept in the early 1970s. Today, in my opinion, the MTA’s neighborhood maps, complete with nearby landmarks and subway staircase location, are the most useful of the various guides and maps the agency offers, and this week, Transit formally announced a redesign in conjunction with NYC DOT’s WalkNYC wayfinding initiative.

“This partnership with the MTA allows for consistent maps above and below ground, making it easier for users to reach their destinations,” NYC DOT Commissioner and MTA Board Member Polly Trottenberg said. “We’re excited to provide this resource to New Yorkers and tourists to find their way in the city.”

For over two decades, the MTA has maintained neighborhood maps through shifting subway service patterns and changes above ground. Currently, the agency has 68 maps in all 468 subway stations, each with a radius of around 15-30 blocks. The current iteration is imprecise as the same map you’ll see in, say, Union St. is the same as the one hanging at Grand Army Plaza or 15th Street-Prospect Park stations. The new Pentagram-designed maps will instead be centered around the station in which they hang and incorporate the design of the WalkNYC wayfinding maps but with more information relating to other transit options included local, express and SBS lines. The new maps will focus on around only 12 blocks instead.

“Though we’ve kept the MTA’s neighborhood maps up-to-date, this is the first redesign since the original set created more than 20 years ago and will be extremely helpful to subway customers as they leave the system and look for neighborhood points of interest,” Paul Fleuranges, the MTA’s Senior Director of Corporate and Internal Communications, said. “With this new map, everyone will rely on one way-finding system, both above and below ground.”

The station schematics in the neighborhood maps will remain in the new versions.

To me, as I noted, the best part of the current maps are the station footprints. These maps are generally displayed in the fare control areas with diagrams showing exactly where, aboveground, staircases lead. It’s convenient for exiting and even more so for entering at unfamiliar stations. When I first saw the new maps, I thought this vital cog had been removed, but upon closer examination, and with a confirmation from the MTA, I learned this was not only not the case but a real reason why the maps will be slowly rolled out throughout the city. “Of course the new neighborhood maps contain subway stairway info,” an MTA spokesman said to me. “That was actually one of the time consuming things as station shapes and entrances are not in the DOT’s database of information.”

The new signs are currently in five stations that all intersect the SBS B44’s route. The list includes Bedford-Nostrand on the G, the Nostrand Ave. stations along the 3 and A/C, and the 2 and 5 trains’ President and Sterling St. stations. It’s a subtle, but positive, improvement for the benefit of customers.

Massimo and his map. (Photo by Benjamin Kabak)

Whenever I unfold one of my original 1970s Massimo Vignelli subway diagrams, I’m always struck by how small they are. Compared with the maps the MTA hands out today that lend themselves to awkward interactions that clearly indicate someone unfamiliar with the subways, the city or both, Vignelli’s maps open smaller than even a tabloid newspaper. They were meant to be stuffed into a pocket and consulted when needed. They also launched a thousand endless debates of form over function. To honor Vignelli, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 83, let’s have another.

For the vast majority of New Yorkers — or at least the vast majority of New Yorkers who have heard of him — the name Massimo Vignelli conjures up images of a very distinctive style in subway map history. For 42 years, in fact, New Yorkers have debated this map, and in the minds of this city’s millions, it will be Vignelli’s lasting legacy even as our lives are infused with his designs for American Airlines, for National Parks brochures, for Big Brown Bags, for countless other items that use and exploit the stark lines of Helvetica, his preferred font.

Over the past few years, I had the opportunity to see Vignelli speak, first on a panel and later in a presentation. He had a sharp wit and a good sense of humor, but he also had a clear stubborn streak. He always felt, long after the MTA pushed him away and then brought him back into the fold, that his subway diagram — definitely not a map, mind you, but a diagram — was better than anything before it and certainly better than the overloaded mess of a map the MTA has tried to streamline in recent years. It had smooth angles, clear lines and obvious colors, and it was designed to get a straphanger from place to place underground, not from place aboveground to place aboveground via the underground.

Simplicity was key to Vignelli. During a 2012 talk at the Transit Museum, Vignelli spoke of his philosophy while heaping criticism on the current map. His design featured straight lines at 45-degree angles of various orientations. As he put it, “Line, dot, that’s it. No dot, no stop.” While looking at the current map with its curved route lines and angled text, he asked, of the Montague St. tunnel, “Who cares if the subway has to go around like that?”

New Yorkers of course hated it. Their subway map had been an amorphous blob of shades of grey, red and green, and the new Vignelli map was a shock to the system. It had so many colors and lines and angles, and for some reason, parks weren’t the right shape and 50th St. and 8th Ave. was east of 50th St. and Broadway. That, from day one, seemed to be the sticking point. Vignelli’s diagram, designed to be used by those with a modicum of knowledge about the city’s grid and in conjunction neighborhood maps that, to this day, still populate subway stops, was a geographic mess. After seven years of complaints, the MTA torpedoed his subway diagram in favor of the first version of the map we know and use today.

Over the years, Vignelli would harbor grudges against those at the TA who pushed him out, but he eventually reached a detente and a reconciliation. He redesigned his map in 2008 for Men’s Vogue, and the printing sold out nearly immediately. The diagram appeared on a dress at Nordstrom’s in 2009, and he reproduced a 2012 version that currently hangs in my living room. His design formed the basis for the MTA’s Weekender app and the Super Bowl’s Regional Transit Diagram. Long a piece in the Museum of Modern Art, his diagram is seeming here to stay in some form or another.

Massimo’s legacy extends well beyond this controversial map. In addition to the ways in which his designs have created conversation and controversy, he also streamlined signage in the subway system. He and Bob Noorda, who passed away four years ago, reimagined the way signage works and appears in the subway system. With a few changes, his Helvetica designs remain in place (though he, like I, never embraced “Exit Middle of Plat” as an appropriate shorthand for anything). The general philosophy behind subway signage lives on in the Graphics Standard Manual.

Vignelli’s passing leaves that role of stubborn, funny, cantankerous man to someone else. His map, his subway diagram, his angles and font will forever live on.

For more on Vignelli, I recommend the obit in The Times, and a piece penned in The Wall Street Journal by friend-of-SAS Keith Williams. Michael Beirut offered up his memories of Massimo as well.

The Vignelli map, in wearable form.

A map I don’t much like. (Click to enlarge)

As far as creative takes on New York City subway maps go, I’m a pretty accepting guy. I don’t hate the current map, though I find it a bit overrun with information, and I’ve always enjoyed attempts at reimagining the map. The Vignelli map, of course, remains the standard for artistic design trumping usefulness, and the KICK Map seems to meld something easy to read with something useful. Lately, we’ve seen New York’s system with a DC twist, a regional transit map and even a circular map. But now I’ve found one I don’t like.

Over the past few days, Jug Cerovic’s project to standardize the world’s subway maps has been making the rounds. As The Atlantic Cities’ Jenny Xie explained, Cerovic has tried to come up with a design that can be applied across the world and is both easy to read and easy to memorize. It otherwise fails as a useful navigating tool.

Here’s a little summary of what passes for Cerovic’s design philosophy:

Underlying all of this is INAT, a set of guidelines Cerovic developed to help him design maps that are easy to read and memorize. Key rules? Enlarging city centers to accommodate the crowd of lines and stations, and using a uniform set of colors, symbols, and labeling. He also kept all the lines vertical, horizontal, or 45 degrees inclined, and limited most of them to no more than five bends on their entire lengths.

Some might argue that uniformity wipes out the cities’ unique identities. But Cerovic says he tried to make each map very different through overarching symbolic shapes. For example, the Moscow design follows the form of a circle, while the Beijing design is more rectangular.

Cerovic compares his maps to road signs. “They’re not the same in the whole world but they’re very similar — so if you go to another place, you’ll seem to recognize the meaning of the signs,” he says in a phone interview.

That’s all well and good, but take a look at New York City on top. What is going on there? Bay Ridge and Coney Island appear to be due east of each other and of Lower Manhattan; Central Park is a puny rectangle toward the northern part of Manhattan; and the G train terminates north of Atlantic Ave. near both 7th Ave. and Prospect Park on the BMT Brighton Line. It violates the basic tenets of cardinal directions and map making. Even the best subway schematics have some bearing on reality; this one has none.

I appreciate what Cerovic is trying to do. I see why you might want to pick a universal design for subway maps, but if you’re going to try to produce a quasi-geographic schematic, it must have some relation to reality. It cannot be so divorced from the city layout to be useless as a map and as a navigation tool. But I’m not one to pass up an opportunity to share a new map with the world. So there you go. I don’t like it, but it’s a twist.

I’m always a sucker for a good map and even more so when it’s actually a subway map with a related gimmick. Here’s a good one via Reddit that’s been making the rounds. It’s a mash-up of the best Manhattan coffee shops by subway stop. Click the image above for a larger version; it should open in a new window.

Now, as with any of these “best of” maps, there’s bound to be debate. Eataly, for instance, is a bold choice for the 23rd St. BMT stop, and Pier NYC on Roosevelt Island is a seasonal outdoor food spot without much of an emphasis on coffee. But with the exception of a few dry spots — that Dunkin Donuts at 110th St. on the 2/3 sticks out like a sore thumb — it avoids chains and Starbucks. Now, imagine the same for the city’s bars or restaurants or even an expansion into Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx.

A few weeks ago, I wrote on the first-of-its-kind regional transit diagram that the Port Authority, MTA and NJ Transit had produced for Super Bowl visitors. While it doesn’t show frequencies, the map offers an overview of the region’s rail connections between New Jersey and Manhattan. As Sunday’s Big Game is part of the so-called Mass Transit Super Bowl, this map is designed to get people from one side of the Hudson to the other with few mishaps.

I’ve had a lot of inquiries concerning hard copies of this map. You can download a PDF, but for many, that’s not good enough. For the map-hunters among us, you can find small Z-fold maps at a variety of locations throughout Manhattan and New Jersey, including the Super Bowl Boulevard set up on Broadway, Penn Station and Grand Central. I’ve heard they’re also available at some PATH trains and Secaucus Junction. It’s small and with many folds, but one way or another, these things will wind up on eBay selling for obscene amounts in a few years. Grab one while you can.