Subway Maps

The London Tube map with distance grid lines. Click the image to enlarge.

I’ve always enjoyed discussing the way subway maps are designed. Schematic-based maps give away to geography which lead to the intersection of the two, and it seems as though there is no right answer in the quest to develop the most useful and visually appealing map.

The London Underground’s map enjoys its place amongst the iconography of world subway maps. Harry Beck’s map is one of the most instantly recognizable around, and it’s also one of the maps least tied to the surrounding geography. Stations in the London core are placed to fit on the map and not the corresponding street grid, and tourists who try to use the map to navigate become hopelessly lost.

One designer has tried to remedy the situation. It’s a map that’s been out there for a few years but recently made an appearance on Boing Boing, and it attempts to bring a sense of distance to the Underground map. It is, simply put, the London Tube Map with a Distance Grid. Take a look at this close-up:

Here’s how the designer explains it: “The only real difference is that it has a fine grid that shows how far apart the stations are in real life. It also illustrates what the real directions between the stations are. In Zone 1 (pink), the squares have 250m sides, and in the other zones they have 500m sides. If there are exactly 3 squares between a pair of stations in Zone 3, then they are 1.5km apart. If a grid line runs between two stations, then one is due North (or possibly due East) of the other.”

I like the idea as a static map, but as an on-the-go pocket tool, it’s not so practical. The lines are a bit too hard to read, and it requires more thought that a map should. But it’s a subtle way to impose distance over a schematic map without distorting the features too badly.

A southbound IRT strip map sits on a post at 59th Street. (Photo by Juliette Wallack)

A few weeks ago, I write a short post on new strip maps that had begun to appear in a few select East Side subway stations. At the time, the MTA said to me that this initiative was the start of a plan to “increase the availability of easy-to-read maps throughout the system.” Today, a pair of articles illuminates the effort.

Over at DNA Info, Jill Colvin explored these new maps and tracked down a bunch of them at 59th and 34th Sts. for a slideshow. According to her reporting, these maps are still a trial. “This is a pre-cursor to the pilot,” MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said to her.

The authority, which has yet to determine a final design or a price point for the maps, is testing two versions. Those along the IRT are shorter and wider while those along the BMT are longer and narrow. In part, those design choices are part of the pre-pilot, and in part, the design choices are dictated by the routes that share tracks. The 4 and 5 branch off only at the northern ends while the R’s route can be represented on a linear strip map.

Meanwhile, over at the City Room blog, The Times profiled the maps as well. Aaron Donovan of the MTA spoke with Sydney Ember about the map. He said Transit wants passengers to know where they are “at a glance…without having to closely scrutinize or study a more broader map.”

So far, at least, these maps are far more prominent than the few that remain behind plexiglass on random platforms throughout the city, and they are reminiscent of a long-lost feature of the subway map. They are, of course, most useful during the day as they show only peak-hour service. I haven’t seen them in person yet, but in photos, they appear visible and useful.

A new paper underscores how the design of a subway map can impact passengers' travel decisions.

New York City’s subway map has a tortured existence. As I’ve written many times over the past four and a half years, the map is not quite schematic and not quite geographically accurate, and thus, it serves only as a loose proxy for navigation throughout the city. According to a new study, that could lead to warped perceptions about New York.

In a paper entitled “Mind the map! The impact of transit maps on path choice in public transit,” NYU graduate professor Zhan Guo explores how cartographical distortions can impact people’s relationships with the city writ large. The Transportationist highlights the paper’s conclusion (and a working paper edition is available online). It reads, in part:

The case study on the London Underground confirms that a schematic transit map indeed affects passengers’ path choices. Moreover, the map effect is almost two times more influential than the actual travel time. In other words, underground passengers trust the tube map (two times) more than their own travel experience with the system. The map effect decreases when passengers become more familiar with the system but is still greater than the effect of the actual experience, even for passengers who use the underground 5 days or more per week.

The paper also shows that the codification of transfer connections is also important. Different codification can make a transfer look more or less convenient on a transit map than in reality, which will either decrease or increase the perceived transfer inconvenience for the corresponding stations. This paper observes both situations in the underground case study and quantifies this codification effect, in terms of the number of attracted or precluded transfers, for four major transfer stations: Baker St., Bank/Monument, Victoria, and Oxford Circus.

Of course, these results are only based on the London Underground, a unique case in many aspects. Few transit maps enjoy such public popularity as the tube map in London. Many transit maps include prominent geographical features, which dilute the map effect. Other systems have different past or present versions of their transit map, which precludes a lasting and stable map effect. Many metropolitan regions possess an easier-to-comprehend urban form than London, which could weaken the role of a transit map in the formation of a cognitive map. The subway map effect in New York City is probably different from that in London. Therefore, readers should be cautious about making generalizations.

In spite of the last sentence in the excerpt above. Guo ponders how maps can impact transit operations and planning. A map, he says, “might unintentionally shift more passengers to a congested segment in the network and thus form a bottleneck” and a modification of a map could “change passenger behavior and mitigate platform and train crowding.” It’s the ultimate in human behavioral manipulation underground.

Over at Greater Greater Washington, David Alpert explored how applying Guo’s findings could impact the DC map. The changes, he notes, are not necessarily positive ones. A redesigned DC map would better show various landmarks in relationship with each other — Union Station’s proximity to the Capitol is one example — but it doesn’t necessarily improve overall system use.

“This is less useful in many ways than the classic map,” Alpert writes. “Most riders travel to and from stations in the core, and tourists or other riders unfamiliar with the system are most likely of all to do so. This map gives little space to that area and leaves large amounts of empty space at the edges.”

In New York, our map suffers from this problem in certain hub areas. It’s tough to tell how far places in Midtown are from the subway, and transfers are often distorted. For instance, the current iteration of the subway map makes no mention of the fact that the Q and N stop at a different platform at Canal St. than the R train does, and the transfer from the Shuttle to the C at Franklin Ave. in Brooklyn in deceptively far.

Ultimately, as Guo writes, “individual passengers and transit agencies should ‘mind the map’ in order to make their best planning decisions.” It is yet another consideration to ponder as the subway map, always a popular topic of conversation and debate, is revised and reevaluated.

An excerpt of the night subway map from Astoria Bike. Click the image for a full version.

One of the constant complaints concerning the MTA’s subway map is how it isn’t exactly a comprehensive glimpse at service. Rather that representing the subway system as it is at all times, the current subway map shows service as it is during peak hours. It doesn’t reflect mid-day service changes; it doesn’t reflect weekend routes; and it certainly doesn’t show overnight service.

These shortcomings have long been recognized by the authority. In fact, the new map explicitly warns straphangers of its limitations, but although it urges users to check its website for information on off-peak re-routing, nowhere does a map exist on the MTA’s site with that information. In the digital age, that is a resource that should be readily available to the public.

Now, though, the writer behind Astoria Bike has tried to cure that omission. He has produced a late-night subway map. He offers up the impetus behind the map and a tale of trying to get the MTA on board:

Unlike every other city in the world, the MTA has never made a map of night service. This is a pretty big omission. Want to know how to get home? The official MTA party line is, “Overhead directional signs on platforms show… late night service.” Well that’s not much help! Especially given the horrible up-to-20-minute Zombie Wait (cue dripping water and rats). And God forbid you have to transfer. Or make an honest mistake because you trusted the day map! I pity the poor person waiting for the R late at night to take them to Queens…

The other night I was at Court Street in Brooklyn and was overjoyed to see the N train pulling in. I guess it does so every night. But I didn’t know. Because it’s not on the map.

After that night I actually wrote the MTA and offered to make a map night for them. Not surprisingly, I sort of got the runaround. So I did my best with photoshop and what I could find on line. I know the MTA is kind of anal about things like this, but my intentions are pure and non-commercial. This is a public service. I did the best I could. And any errors are my own (do let me know if you find mistakes). I do not claim any rights to this map (nor should you). It’s the MTA’s, if they want it. But they had nothing to do with the production.

Those interested can find a PDF version of the map right here, and it’s a useful thing to have late at night. Outside of the cost, there’s really no good reason for the MTA to avoid producing its own overnight map. There are just too many system changes after midnight and enough riders to justify the guide.

A 1950s-era subway map served as the inspiration for this whole cloth quilt. (Photo via flickr user the workroom)

I always love seeing what other people are doing with the New York City Subway Map. From dresses to sunglasses, various iterations of the map serve as inspiration for the both the commercial and the artistic.

Today’s map draws its inspiration from the 1950s, and it is that map on a whole cloth quilt. Amusingly enough, it comes from a workshop in Toronto, and the stitcher even made sure to get the color coding as accurate as possible. For more on the map, check out Make Something’s post about it. With the subway map, an iconic image of New York City, anything is possible.

Conductor (Interactive instrument in progress) from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

Check out this video from Alexander Chen. He currently works at the Google Creative Lab and has producing interactive works since 2003. The piece above takes the Vingelli subway map and some HTML 5 and Javascript coding to create a musical work out of the subway map. Says Chen on his blog:

Tentatively titled Conductor, it recreates the New York subway system as a musical instrument. It’s currently built in HTML5 + Javascript. SVG was very useful, as I could create the design in Illustrator, then import the coordinates into Javascript.

These videos are still in-progress tests. I plan to import an actual subway schedule from the MTA’s subway API and have subway trains triggering the performance. After that, I hope to start on an iPad version that would function more as a user-driven instrument.

I decided to use Vignelli’s beautiful 1972 subway map as a starting point for the design. Which will be interesting because a few lines like the 8 and 9 no longer exist.

In another piece embedded below, Chen used moving trains along the lines of the map to create a different piece. These are still works in progress, and Chen says he’ll post updates at his site. Check it out. I love creative uses of the subway map imagery, and these are quite unique.

Conductor (In progress demo) from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

The New York City Subway map, it seems, is always controversial. At a December talk at the Museum of the City of New York, designers past and present offered up their critiques, and I’ve burned many a pixel discussing elements of the current map.

Absent from the museum discussion though was Michael Hertz, the designer of the current subway map. Hertz, who says he never received an invite to the event and was not asked to speak, contacted me to offer up his defense of his subway map and his views on the controversial history of the map. What follows are his words and views (not mine). I ran Parts One, Two and Three in December, and we pick up the tale from there. Hopefully, his explanations will help illuminate the thinking behind the current subway map.

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

As work continued on the new map, there were a few more experiments in routing display, unseen by the public, (thank God), including a two-color and a three-color routing system. I have recently seen slides of these thanks to Peter Lloyd, but cannot remember the rationale for it, other than to offer some kind of visual separation of all the spaghetti strands. Unfortunately, people have some kind of unconscious mechanism that tries to connect different line colors with some kind of difference in meaning. Whatever we accomplished or improved was without the benefit of a real color coding system. The public outcry for color-coding the routes in some fashion continued.

It was around mid 1978 that the committee’s recommendation for a trunk line color system – a recommendation that previously had gone unheeded – was finally taken seriously. Chairman John Tauranac, with his usual energy for the project, presented the committee’s proposal to MTA Chairman Harold Fisher, and this time Fischer approved the idea. Apparently, the funding issue which was the reason we had not gone forward with this scheme until then, ceased to be an impediment. The trunk lines were the cornerstone of a new map, with an excellent rationale for dividing up the route colors into logical group, that would indeed enable us to succeed in creating a map that more people were able to use.

Strangely enough, even with all the bright people, with all the expertise you can put in one room, (the committee) It took a complete outsider, a clerk In the TA’s Electrical Department, with no connection to mapping at all, to come up with this clever notion, and put it into the suggestion box. Actually, the final product that we developed, had never been publicly tested but embodied, in a logical, orderly fashion, exactly what the riders were asking for.
Chairman Fisher knew about this tail-wagging-the-dog situation, and the new map lead the way for the whole system’s station and car signage to be turned on its head. Fisher deserves a lot of credit for his vision of a new beginning of successful navigation of New York’s subways. The MTA realized that it would take a staggering amount of money to redo all the station signage. At that time, just the fabrication of porcelain enamel signs cost about $85/sq ft (roughly estimated at that time to run close to $30 million) and I never heard any actual guesses on cost for the approximately 8,000 subway cars. The cost for design and printing of the map was almost inconsequential when compared to all the other numbers.

In contrast to Massimo’s use of eight matched Pantone colors to delineate 25 different subway lines, we elected to go for 11 matched colors for 11 lines, condensing the lines running down 8th, 7th, 6th (Ave of Americas at the time), Broadway, and Lexington, respectively, as a trunkline for each avenue of operation. You can see why Vignelli ran into problems with criss-crossing of identical colors on lines with no family relation to each other. For example, the N on Canal intersecting with the 6 on Lex, both PMS 130 (yellow-orange) is a typical ‘conflict’ spot, as is the 4 and the F at Houston, both PMS 239 (magenta).

Where route lines of the same Panatone color overlapped on the Vignelli map, navigating the system became difficult.

Massimo was forced to compromise the purity of his color palette by tinting (lightening) one of the conflicting colors in each case so as to minimize the color collision. This happens all over the map. This situation also gave me the big heads-up about considering signage and mapping as part of a continuum, not to be conceived as separate entities at separate times, but both as part-and-parcel of a master program.

The ‘tinting’ that I speak of, not only departs from the actual color specs, but was not even that reliable when printed on uncoated stock, creating less of a tone shift than will work as a difference maker. Also PMS 185 (red) does not always print with enough difference from PMS 239 (magenta) when viewed with the different light sources that must be encountered.

Concerned about our proposed yellow-orange for the ‘N’, ‘QB’, ‘R’ lines with small white ‘drop-out’ letters, I sent our tentative color palette to an ophthalmologist, specializing in color issues, who was recommended to me by the American Foundation for the Blind in Manhattan. He cautioned me about the tiny white letters, and furthermore, was dubious of the color itself when viewed in the subway cars under fluorescent lighting.

This evaluation provided the impetus for A) deepening the color, originally PMS 116, to PMS 130, and, B) changing the route designation letter to black, for this one trunk line, to the chagrin of at least one prominent designer of the 1970s. More about him next time, but if you’ve ever driven to La Guardia Airport looking for the Delta terminal (yellow-orange with a white ‘D’ and nearly invisible in the morning sun) you’ll have to acknowledge the correctness of this design decision.

Michael Hertz is the designer of many transit maps, illustrated airport directory maps and other wayfinding devices around the U.S. He designed the 1979 NY City Subway Map and has handled all of the revisions since. In 1976 he was awarded this design contract after creating five borough bus maps, and a Westchester bus map that were praised by the press and the public.