<h1>SUBWAY MAPS</h1>

The New York City Subway system is comprised of 26 lines that make stops at 468 stations on 660 miles of track. The oldest line–the IRT–began operating in 1904. Back then, the system was run by 3 competing businesses. “The result was a tangled spaghetti of train lines, a mess of a “system” that was almost comical in its complexity” (Bierut 136).

Outside the system, City dwellers lived and worked on streets and in neighborhoods that had been set in a near perfect grid. The contrast between above and below ground–between order and chaos–created problems in designing a map to navigate the subway system. The first serious attempt at designing a map for riders occurred after the three original lines were consolidated.

In 1958, graphic designer George Salomon designed a schematic at 45 degree diagonals featuring the Akzidenz Grotesk typeface (Ovenden 32). Salomon’s map looked great but critics derided the design’s lack of scale and geographic proportion. After a few revisions, the map was turned over to Massimo Vignelli.

Vignelli's Map

In 1972, Vignelli offered a redesigned map modeled after Harry Beck’s schematic for the London Underground. The result was a clear and intelligible map of great beauty. Vignelli simplified New York’s subway system by designating a unique color for each line and representing each stop with a dot. Each line was set at 45 and 90 degree angles. Once again, the critics cried foul. Unlike London, they argued, New York’s streets above ground had order and distances between streets and avenues had become second nature to New Yorkers (Bierut 137). Worse yet, Vignelli had decided to represent Central Park as a square despite the fact that the park is longer than it is wide (Bierut 137).


And so in 1979, the MTA formed a committee to take up the design again. This time, the emphasis was on topography. The new design brought geography to the surface but buried riders with too much information. The result was a large, two–sided map filled with callouts and detail. The goal was to help people navigate the system and find their way around town. But all the detail made the system intimidating at a time when the City needed riders. This map remains in circulation throughout the system today.

Jabbour's Map

Eddie Jabbour is trying to change that. Jabbour set out to design a map that restores Vignelli’s simplicity without sacrificing scale and topography. He wants a map his family, friends and 17 year old daughter can read. He started out by stripping the MTA’s map of all the unnecessary bus and commuter rail line information. This freed up space to create the detail required to help riders get around both above and below ground. Like Vignelli’s map, lines run at 45 degree diagonals. On Jabbour’s map, local and express trains run parallel to one another making it easy to identify each stop along the line. Jabbour cleaned up the legend, simplified the representation of transfers and set the type indicating each stop—Franklin—right side up.

Jabbour’s map suggests that a hybrid based on diagrammatic concepts with some useful geography could work as well for New York as it does elsewhere.

JABBOUR'S MAP can be found here: KICKMAP

Sources: RESEARCH: Michael Bierut’s, Seventy–nine Short Essays on Design. New York: 2007. Mark Ovenden’s, Transit Maps of the World. Penguin Books: 2003. “Can He Get There From Here?”, Rachel Corbett’s story on Eddie Jabbour in the New York Times (April 22, 2007).