Tag: New York City

New York City Subway Map Gets a Complete Makeover

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Photo: MTA Chair & CEO Janno Lieber, NYCT President Demetrius Crichlow, and Chief Customer Officer Shanifah Rieara unveil a major redesign to the New York City Subway Map at Times Sq-42 St on Wednesday, Apr 2, 2025.
Marc A. Hermann/MTA. CC licence.

New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has announced the first major redesign of its system map since 1979. The new map adopts a diagrammatic style, in common with most other transit maps around the world, for the first time since Massimo Vignelli’s controversial (and ultimately abandoned) 1972 map. Indeed, the MTA is openly acknowledging the influence of Vignelli’s design, along with the colours from the replacement maps designed by Michael Hertz.

The new map was designed by the MTA’s Creative Services Mapping Department and, like many major subway systems around the world, utilizes a diagrammatic style, employing bold, straight lines making it much easier for the eye to follow and more suitable for digital users. The white background, bold colors, horizontal writing and use of black dots make the map more ADA-friendly and easier for people with low-vision or cognitive disabilities to read.

Designers also focused on text legibility, keeping text on one line wherever possible and making better use of open space to alleviate crowding and using a black subway bullet with a white character to provide maximum contrast for easier reading.

A complete New York City Subway map from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
MTA

This isn’t a complete surprise: the MTA started testing a map similar to this one in a few stations back in 2021.

I’ll be very interested to see how this new map will be received. The design of the New York subway map has been contentious for as long as I’ve been alive. Will it continue to be?

A Map of New York City Neighbourhoods

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Back in December 2022, the New York Times asked readers to map their neighbourhoods. They got 37,000 responses; combined with feedback from council members, community boards and another survey, the result is a detailed interactive map of New York City neighbourhoods as seen by New Yorkers that the Times is keeping behind its paywall. The accompanying article talking about how the map came to be and what it reveals, is a bit more accessible (see also archive link). [LanguageHat]

Urban Caffeine on the NYC Subway Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

“I remember the first time I saw the New York City subway map. I called an Uber.” On her Urban Caffeine channel, Thea looks at the oft-maligned, controversial and complicated New York subway map. Her take is informed by her experience growing up in pre-GPS, pre-Google Maps Manila, which she frankly found easier to navigate; by contrast, she finds New York’s map too cluttered and information-dense and more in tune with the needs of New Yorkers than visitors and tourists.

New York and Philadelphia Regional Rail Networks on One Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

NYC and Philadelphia regional rail networks
Evelyn Ivy (GitHub)

Here’s a rail network map that shows the commuter rail lines of both New York City and Philadelphia. It’s by Evelyn Ivy, who explains on Mastodon that it took six months of work to complete. “Showing five different commuter rail systems (#CTRail, #MetroNorth, #LIRR, #NJTransit, and #SEPTA), this map depicts everywhere a passenger can get to by train from NYC or Philadelphia without using Amtrak.” (The keys are Trenton and New Haven, where you can hop from one system to the next.)

Geographical on the NYC Subway Map Debate

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Geographical magazine has a short history of the New York City subway map and its controversies. This has been a fraught and hotly contested topic for most of the last 50 years, and Jules Stewart’s article can’t go into nearly enough depth to capture it all, but it could serve as a decent entry point for those not in the know. Drawing rather heavily on the expertise of Peter Lloyd (previously), Stewart covers the subject from the first subway maps to where the MTA goes from here.

Previously: A Naïve Look at New York’s Subway Map.

Colour and the New York Subway Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Gothamist looks at how colour has been used on maps of New York’s subways: first to to distinguish between subway companies, then to distinguish lines from one another. The post talks to, and draws on the work of, Peter Lloyd, who’s been studying the history of subway mapping in New York and gave a talk last Saturday on the subject of colouring the map’s subway lines. See Peter’s blog post on the subject from this time last year.

NYC Tree Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Screenshot of the NYC Tree Map
Screenshot

The impressive and/or insane thing about the New York City Tree Map is that it maps individual trees: now about 860,000 of them, all managed by the city’s parks department on city streets and in parks, down to the species and trunk diameter, which also means you can filter for those parameters, plus get most recent inspection and tree care data on specific trees. You can even favourite individual trees. If trees had social media accounts, they’d be here. [Bloomberg CityLab]

Previously: Mapping Central Park’s 19,630 Trees.

More on the New York Subway Map Debate

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

This roundtable discussion about The New York Subway Map Debate, a book about the April 1978 Cooper Union debate over the design of the New York subway map (previously) and related subjects, featuring John Tauranac himself (who participated in the 1978 debate), alerted me to the fact that an audio recording of that debate is available online. (A discussion about a book about a debate: this all feels a bit recursive.) [Kenneth Field]

Frederick Pierce’s ‘Dazzle Camouflage’ Map of New York’s Nationalities

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Map of City of New York showing the distribution of Principal nationalities by sanitary districts

At Worlds Revealed, the Library of Congress’s map blog, Tim St. Onge looks at, and provides the background on, a series of six maps prepared by Frederick E. Pierce for a report on living conditions in New York’s tenement housing in 1895, including a stunningly bizarre map of ethnic groups living in the city.

Pierce’s map of nationalities, however, is a more memorable, if confounding, centerpiece. Aiming to convey diversity among immigrant communities in New York, the map depicts the proportion of major “nationalities” in each sanitary district of the city. The result is a dizzying array of zigzag stripes and scattered points. As Pierce writes in his explanatory notes accompanying the Harper’s Weekly publication, the original map was produced in color and adapted to black and white for publication, but the reproduction “is almost as effective and quite as illustrative as the original.” Despite Pierce’s confidence, perhaps the average reader could be forgiven if they find the map to be more difficult to parse. In fact, the map seems to resemble more closely the dazzle camouflage, a design aimed at confusing the observer, used on British and American warships in the first half of the twentieth century.

New York’s MTA Is Testing a New Subway Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

MTA Customer Information Pilot Maps
The MTA’s new geographically accurate (left) and diagrammatic (right) subway maps, now being tested at nine stations. (MTA)

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority is experimenting with new network maps that adopt a diagrammatic design that harkens back to Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 design, or (frankly) to designs used by most other transit systems. The new maps appear in nine subway stations side-by-side with geographically accurate maps of the MTA system, and embed QR codes so riders can submit feedback. If the maps are positively received, they could replace the MTA’s current network map—but New York being New York, and New York’s map wars being what they’ve been for the past fifty years or so, it’s anyone’s guess how this will shake out. More at Gizmodo.

The New York Subway Map Debate

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The New York Subway Map DebateBack in 1978, Massimo Vignelli and John Tauranac debated the future of New York’s subway map. That debate—which in many ways never quite ended—is now the subject of a book coming out later this month. Edited by Gary Hustwit, The New York Subway Map Debate includes a full transcript of the debate and subsequent discussion (thanks to the discovery of a lost audio recording), plus contemporary photos and new interviews. Paperback available for $40 via the link.

Where Americans Go without a Car

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Map of car-free households in New York CityGeographer Christopher Winters maps car ownership—or rather the lack thereof—in The Geography of Carfree Households in the United States. In only a few census tract do more than 75 percent of the population go without owning a car. Not surprisingly, most of them are in New York, plus other densely populated cities: “New York has many more such households than any other urban area. It’s the one large place in the United States where only a minority of households have a vehicle available.”

New York City’s Live Subway Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Screenshot of NYC Live Subway Map (MTA)
MTA (screenshot)

New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority has released a beta of a new digital subway map that aims to solve several problems at once. It shows train positions in real time and provides service bulletins in a single location. It also promises, says Fast Company’s Mark Wilson, to bridge the long-standing (and often acrimonious) divide between geographically accurate transit maps (Hertz) and diagrammatic network diagrams (Vignelli).

Here’s a video about how the new digital map came to be:

On Transit Maps, Cameron Booth has some criticisms of the map and its approach. “The main selling point of this map is that it has the clarity of a diagram but the fidelity of a geographical map—‘The best of both worlds!’ the articles happily proclaimed this morning—but the reality is more like ‘Jack of all trades; master of none.’ As much as I try, I simply can’t see any real benefit to this approach.”

Another point Booth makes, and I can confirm, is that the map isn’t just slow; it’s profoundly slow. On Safari it makes my current-generation, eight-core Core i7 iMac with 40 GB of RAM and a Radeon Pro 5500 XT feel like a snail; it’s a little better on Chrome, and on my third-generation iPad Air, but it’s still slow and janky and not very pleasant to use. Well, it’s a beta. But a beta that crawls on hardware faster than what most people own is, I’d gently suggest, not ready for release.

[Kottke]

COVID Zones

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

City of New York (left); Province of Quebec (right)

Rather than applying restrictions across their entire jurisdictions, several authorities are designating zones to target measures to prevent the spread of novel coronavirus where the spread is at its greatest. Maps can quickly indicate not only where COVID is at its worst, but also where restrictions have been put into place. Two examples: New York City (above left) and the province of Quebec (above right). New York’s map is interactive and has an address search, whereas Quebec’s map is spectacularly ungranular: diagonal lines show that a region has more strict restrictions in some areas but not others, but does not map those areas (which are indicated in text).

Alex Russell’s Great Maps of Brooklyn

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Alex Russell, “The Great Map of Williamsburg” (2020)

Last October, Alex Russell released his first pictorial map of a Brooklyn neighbourhood, the Great Map of Greenpoint. It was begun, he says, “as an effort to drive business around the neighborhood. As a restaurant owner in Greenpoint, it was to draw attention to everything this great little area had to offer.” His follow-up, the Great Map of Williamsburg (above), ran straight into the pandemic, as Greenpointers reports:

“My printer closed their doors for a few months just as my order went in,” Russell said of his map, which went to print right as the coronavirus halted New York’s spring. “Sadly, I have recently discovered that a handful of the businesses on The Great Map of Williamsburg have closed due to COVID. I will be delivering their maps to them this week as a bittersweet memory of what was. Some of them, like Brooklyn Charm, had been there for over a decade. I feel honored to have had the chance to be a part of their history.”

Both maps are available for sale as posters; Williamsburg costs $40 and Greenpoint costs $25. [News12 Brooklyn]