View from Underground

The most useful poster nowhere to be found. (Courtesy of Vignelli Associates. Click to enlarge.)

In 1966, the newly formed Metropolitan Transportation Authority was busy planning for its subway system takeover, still two years away. Within the five boroughs, the Metropolitan Commuter Transportation Authority, as it was originally called, faced the challenge of rebranding a subway system that was, in parts, over six decades old.

At the time, the subways were a mishmash of signs and fonts. It was a graphics design nightmare. Signage left over from when the subways were run by competing corporations — the Interborough Rapid Transit company and the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Company — and the city’s own Independent Subway System dominated the tunnels and clashed with each other. There was no consistency to it, no unique identity.

To remedy this problem, the MTA turned to Massimo Vignelli, one of the foremost Modernist designers of the era. While Vignelli would come to fame and infamy in New York due to his artistic but confusing subway map, the system still relies on signage and graphics he designed over four decades ago.

Taking a modular approach to subway signs, Vignelli used a clear Sans Serif font — Akzidenz-Grotesk, a cousin of the popular Helevtica — and designed the familiar paneled signs that could be manipulated to present everything from line route information to station identification. While Vignelli’s original designs were white with black lettering, vandals armed with spray paint quickly defaced these signs, and the MTA adopted the familiar white-on-black signs we know today.

As I was poking around the Vignelli Associates Web site recently, I came upon a partial representation of one of Vignelli’s signs that you see above. I did a double-take when I saw it simply because it is exactly what the New York City subway system is missing.

Allow me to present a familiar scene. A large family, clearly not from New York, is huddled near the token booth trying to make heads or tails of the subway map. They’re at Grand St. in Chinatown; they need to get to the Upper West Side to visit their daughter at Columbia; and it’s Saturday. They can’t tell which trains are running where, what to transfer to or how to go.

Enter this long-lost Vignelli sign posted above. Adaptable to individual stations, this sign explicitly lays out how to get from that point of entry to any other major station in the system. Using two columns — one labeled “Destination,” the other “How to get there” — this sign is a textbook example of an easy and direct way to present complicated information. Suddenly, the tourists don’t need to decipher a map; they can read a sentence instructing them to take an uptown D to 59th St./Columbus Circle, where they can switch to a 1 train making local stops through the Upper West Side. Easy as pie.

Why the MTA (or, in this case, New York City Transit) doesn’t employ signs such as these in popular stations is a question I will have to research. It wouldn’t be too hard to stick these types of signs up in tourist hot spots with directions to other major New York City destinations, and, in fact, it’s easy to group stations served by the same line in nearby neighborhoods as well.

It’s a testament to Vignelli’s abilities that his designs have withstood four decades of time. They still look good in the subways today, and his designs are evocative of the New York subway system. Perhaps then we should bring back one of his earlier ideas; it’s much easier to read a sign telling riders “how to get there” then it is to decode the subway map.

Where: The last car of a Canarsie-bound L train
When: Yesterday evening, shortly after 6:30 p.m. at Lorimer St.

Pardon the blur. It’s tough to grab a photo and sneak out of the subway doors as they’re closing. It seems that some enterprising prankster or some oblivious MTA worker had some issues with the subway map. Or perhaps the world has literally been turned upside down.

Where: Express tracks on the 7 at Shea Stadium
What: A discarded green MetroCard thrown out by a Mets fan heading back toward Manhattan.

For some reason, I don’t think this is what the MTA had in mind when they started their green campaign. A MetroCard thrown on the tracks is litter even if it’s yellow, green or blue. I thought there was something poetic in the irony of an environmentally themed MetroCard lying on the tracks as just another piece of subway trash.

Man overboard! (Photo courtesy of Reuters)

Last Tuesday, I noted the impending reefing of a bunch of old subway cars. Well, bad weather postponed the sinking of the old cars until Friday, and three days ago, Reuters reporters and photographers were on hand to capture the subways going down to the sea bed. The news wire had a short story about the sinking and a nifty slideshow too. My favorite is this one that shows the train slowly sinking. It’s poignantly sad. I’d love to be on that barge watching the cars go down.

As the start date for the Culver Viaduct rehabilitation project nears, more architectural renderings of the proposed changes to the Smith-9th Sts. station are finding their ways to the Internet. Above is rendering posted on Curbed yesterday, and frankly, it’s tough to guess what the MTA’s construction folks were thinking with this one.

My biggest problem with this proposed redesign is that this weird, metallic thing looks absolutely nothing like anything else in the subway system. Sure, the MTA should be keeping an eye on the future, but the original designs are at least evocative of the subway. This looks more like an installation at the New Museum than a subway stop. If the intentions here were to build a structure reminiscent of the Gowanus area’s industrial past, I don’t think this hair dryer, as someone on Curbed called it, is the right way to go.

There once were some placards with rhyme
To destroy them would be quite a crime.
But the MTA
They did say
Poetry in Motion simply ran out of time.

After 15 years of verse in our heart,
SubTalk will now turn to history and art.
E.B. White and Galileo
Don’t flow quite like Longfellow.
But now we’ll know more about Descartes.

Train of Thought this new program is called.
Alicia Martinez hopes riders will be enthralled.
The Director of Marketing and Corporate Communications
really enjoys these new creations,
and this week they will all be installed.

These new excerpts will come in twos
Every three months you’ll have more to peruse
And with funding from Barnes & Noble,
a much better company than ExxonMobil,
it’s more educational than television news.

Personal space is tough to find in the Shanghai Metro during rush hour. (Photo by flickr user Marc van der Chijs)

I am perennially about a week behind when it comes to reading the New Yorker. They arrive in my mailbox too frequently, and there’s always too much to read. So this afternoon on the way home from work, I wrapped up Nick Paumgarten’s technically adept look at elevators.

The piece spends a lot of time looking at the science and technology behind elevators while focusing on Nicholas White’s harrowing tale. White was, in 1999, stuck for 41 hours in an elevator in the McGraw-Hill building, and he’s never been the same. (On YouTube, you can find the rather harrowing security camera footage from White’s ordeal.) During the course of the technical details about the elevators, Paumgarten dropped in an interesting passage about how the folks behind our urban conveniences figure out how much space is enough space. It, of course, relates to the subway:

If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the “touch zone”; seven square feet as the “no-touch zone”; and ten square feet as the “personal-comfort zone.” Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range—less than eighteen inches between people—“intimate distance,” the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, “Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.”

Moving beyond the technical — I would love to meet a proxemics expert — this brief passages lets us in to a dreadfully obvious secret about the subway: Packed train cars are psychologically taxing on the vast majority of people because there just isn’t enough space. Worse still is the fact that schizophrenic people prefer fifteen times more space that non-schizophrenics. No wonder the subways seem packed with crazy people sometimes; we’re in their space.

Day in and day out, New Yorkers choose to subject themselves to the psychologically taxing demands of a subway ride. We cram ourselves into cars that are too hot or too cold, cars that have annoyingly whiny PA systems (the old R40 Slants on the B line come to mind), cars without enough space to move without jostling or, worse yet, smelling the person who’s just too close to us.

Even in subway cars with space, we still feel the encroaching others in our personal space. Everyone knows that familiar feeling of resentment when a passenger stands just a step or two too close to you in a half-empty car. That’s your touch zone coming under attack. Tell them to back it up to the persona-comfort zone.

This psychological disturbances are why people in the New York City subway systems seem generally unfriendly. It’s why people won’t make eye contact with each other and why two people attracted to each other won’t attempt to strike up a conversation. It’s also why subway riders get a rush of calmness and serenity upon leaving a crowded train and finding their ways aboveground at rush hour. There’s just not enough space.

Ride the L train long enough, and the digital signs will get around to asking you the following question, posed in three parts:

So did you, dear rider, ever think you would be able to charge a subway ride? Did you know that you could use a debit or credit card to buy a new MetroCard at MetroCard Vending Machines? Have you know that since these hulking monstrosities were first introduced to the city over eight years ago?

That the question exists isn’t even the saddest part. Rather, the L trains have been broadcasting this PSA non-stop since the R143s were introduced to the line in 2001. Seven years later, we all know that we can charge our MetroCards, and it really wasn’t that shocking in the first place. Time for a new sign.

Stand clear of platform edge. It’s more than just a good idea.

One down — literally; 467 more to go.

In the wake of the public outcry over the collapsing platform at Kings Highway, MTA New York City Transit President Howard Roberts ordered a complete inspection of every station platform in the New York City subway system. The review will begin today.

Teams comprising MTA workers from the System Safety, Maintenance of Way Engineering and Stations division will assemble to look for loose, damaged and missing pieces of the rubber or wooden boards in place on the platform edges. These bumpers act just like those on an automobile: They line platforms to prevent subway cars from coming into direct contact with and being damaged by platform edges.

Paul Fleuranges, vice president of corporate communications at NYCT, stressed the agency’s attention to safety. “If a platform edge rubbing board is found to be in disrepair, it is replaced. It’s that simple,” he said. “As a matter of fact, in 2007 our Station Maintenance Division replaced 9,599 linear feet of rubbing board along platform edges systemwide. Clearly it is an issue we take very seriously.”

Meanwhile, MTA officials continue to stress the dangers of getting too close to that platform edge. Besides the rare collapse — this is the first in recent memory — passengers too close to the edge run the risk of falling or getting brushed back by a train.

Personally, I paid more attention to the platform edge today and straphangers’ behavior around the edge. I noticed that for Avi Katz to fall in a platform collapse, he had to be very close to the edge. In fact, it was hard for me to even get that close to the edge, and I didn’t need to stand that close to the edge to peer down the tunnel in search of an oncoming train.

Ah, yes, the oncoming trains. That brings me to another point: Standing too close to the platform edge is an ingrained New York City Subway tradition. Much like people don’t “stand clear of the closing doors,” people don’t stand back from the platform edge, and they won’t for a long time — here’s the “unless” — unless the MTA gets around to installing those LCD screens that display when the next train is arriving.

Passengers stand too close to the edge because, for some reason, they just have to know where the train is. They have to be the first to see the approaching lights, and they have to believe that staring into dark tunnels makes the train come sooner. Putting up signs that say when the next train is coming would make people step back from the edge. They could relax far from the dangers of the rubber padding that, unbeknownst to most riders, overhangs nothing. While the ADA stripes are part of the physical platform, the last few inches of rubber are just hanging over the tracks.

But before those technologies arrive, stand clear of the platform edge. The MTA has plans to renovate many of those stations along the Q that have been the focus of the news stories this week, but until then, the train will arrive when it arrives, and no amount of peering into the tunnels can change that.