Redesigning the NYC subway map

In rapid transit's slightly-more-than-100-year-history, it has been a rare occurrence to see a city redesign its subway or municipal transportation map. Philadelphia did so in 1976, when SEPTA was created by Conrail to operate suburban trains on the bankrupt Reading and Penn Central railroads, and in 1984, when SEPTA took over, routing all traffic through the Center City Commuter Tunnel and assigning "R" designation to all trains, resulting in the direct precursor to today's system map (some color had been added for the 1980 map). The London Underground's current map looks much the same as it did in 1938 excepting the addition of new lines; previously, they had used a more geographically correct model.

New York's three original companies originally disseminated their own maps, and following their unification in 1940 maps continued to group them by their competing divisions on a reasonably geographically-accurate map of the city. All that began to change in 1959, with the debut of George Salomon's highly stylized map, still grouping lines by division. Less than ten years later, maps were using a less stylized geographical background, but assigned each individual route its own color, the first such map appearing in 1967 (digitally reproduced here). Manhattan trunk lines were grouped by color starting in 1979 and a single-character limit was imposed on route designations in 1985, yielding a map nearly identical to today's.

And there's at least one person pushing for yet another dramatic change in the map's design. Eddie Jabbour of Kick Design has designed a new map, preserving color and route designations but showing each route as its own line on the map, disambiguating the local-vs.-express question that is unique to New York City (check him out at Signal vs. Noise, The Gothamist, or the three-year-old post at Live from the Third Rail that goes back to where it all started). Jabbour has even taken his map to the folks at the MTA, who acknowledge its aesthetic merits but do not see it as a necessary step to take.

Personally, I do like the new maps, visible in comparison here with the current scheme. The argument for geographical accuracy has little merit, considering how skewed the current map is already (the vertical center of Manhattan has been stretched to space the lines further apart, and don't even get me started on the incredible shrinking Staten Island). But, like the MTA, I'm not convinced that a new map is truly a necessity. At least, I've never felt hindered by the current map design. Outsiders to the system may indeed appreciate a more user-friendly approach--perhaps begin publishing maps in two flavors, even on a trial basis?--but it's important to remember as well that insiders to the system rarely feel any need to accommodate outsiders in the least.

Notes on the TGV

Last March 22, I was lucky enough to take my first trip aboard a bona-fide high-speed train: the Eurostar service from Paris to London by way of the Channel Tunnel. Operating at a cruising speed of about 300 km/h (185 mph), the nonstop journey from the Gare du Nord to Waterloo International Station took 3 hours 32 minutes. The England-side part of the journey was considerably slower than it could have been, owing to the Eurostar's running on Southeastern Railway system trackage, which is not equipped for such extreme speeds. This will all be changing soon, however, when a high-speed rail link is opened under the River Thames to Stratford and London's St. Pancras Stations. Though the tracks will have to curve around the entire city of London to approach St. Pancras from the north, the increased distance will be easily offset by the higher speeds that trains will be able to maintain on approach to London.

Also in TGV news, of course, is the record-shattering 574.8 km/h (357 mph) speed set by Alstom's experimental V150 train, so named because of its intended (and easily surpassed) speed of 150 meters per second. The record was tested on the Paris-Strasbourg section of the TGV East-European network, scheduled to begin serving a vast new network in France, Luxembourg and Germany starting this June. This is the highest speed ever reached by a rail-bound train--only magnetic levitation (maglev) trains, which do not touch the rails but rather hover on a frictionless electromagnetic field, are faster.

Besides the obvious bragging rights involved, Alstom is demonstrating the ease with which it intends to continue dominating the high-speed rail market. As their locomotives get more advanced, Alstom's master plan would see the cost per mile per hour decrease enough to woo new nations into constructing TGV networks. I think what needs to happen first is for a construction company to devise a way of cutting the cost of installing the track, which seems to be the most daunting obstacle facing the United States at the moment with regards to a high-speed rail network. The Acela Express' locomotives, built by Alstom, are capable of much higher speeds than those at which they are currently run, but--like the Eurostar until November--are running on curvy regional railroads most of the way between Boston and Washington. Assuming we get our track straightened out one way or another, the US could easily become Alstom country.