The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is once again playing with their graphics.  The agency is testing updated platform signs that list the stops along each subway route.  The previous graphic was an 11x17 black and white sheet that looked as if it had been designed and printed at an MTA worker’s cubicle.  The new ones are finer graphically but unnecessary.  What confuses riders aren’t the stops along the route, but the way old, iconic routes like the F have changed, and the way trains, particularly on the weekends, take alternate routes.

Much more troubling to me are the graphics for the five-borough subway map.  In 1979 the MTA abandoned the graphically exciting but informationally confusing 1972 Massimo Vignelli-designed map (shown above) for one by Michael Hertz, a predecessor of today’s map, which added layers of information about the above-ground world, including major streets and bodies of water.  Then last year, after years of incremental changes, the TA unveiled a more thoroughly updated map which distorted the already-not-accurate landmasses for clarity.  So now Manhattan, that elegant sliver of an island, looks like a pickle, and Brooklyn and Queens run together together like wet pancakes.  The map’s been drained of any last bit of physical reality and become a diagram entirely unrelated to geography, like the London subway map, although without that map’s dazzling complexity.  New Yorkers might have the best subway system in the world, tying together diverse communities and running at all hours.  But we do not have the best map.