Track Changes

New Yorkers can always be counted on to defend and even celebrate the inconveniences that make their lives periodically infuriating. In 2006, when the city first introduced crosswalk signals with countdown clocks—an obvious and reasonable safety measure already in place across the country—a friend complained that the move was a suburban intrusion, a ploy to make us all soft. The pitiful belatedness of our curbside garbage bins or the inaudibility of the speakers through which bus drivers announce upcoming stops isn’t our fault—there are plenty of powerful forces directly responsible for that stuff—but it’s clear that life in New York generates an outsized fetish for low infrastructural expectations.

How else to explain the perverse civic attachment to the New York subway map that dominated trains, platforms, hearts, and minds from 1979 up through this spring, when it was finally put out of its misery? One could make the case that in its first few guises, that map was barely a subway map at all, so overloaded was it with streets, parks, neighborhoods, reservoirs, and so on. As an attempt to bury the memory of Massimo Vignelli’s short-lived but controversially hyperminimalist diagram, it was brutally effective. As a subway map performing its most basic function—mapping the subway—it was sort of ludicrous: dense, busy, unreadable.

Initially overseen by the cartographer John Tauranac and based on a design by Michael Hertz Associates, by the turn of the millennium the 1979 map had evolved into something even more confounding and unusable than the sum of its many, many parts. Co-Op City Boulevard in The Bronx disappeared from view, but for some reason Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens stayed put, alongside a plenitude of other literally surface-level information, like the graveyards that make up Queens’s cemetery belt. (A concession to the map’s deceased readers?) The no-nonsense understatement of a white background gave way to cream in the 1998 edition and then, in 2010, to … what to even call it? High-fructose corn syrup? (When I saw Vignelli and Tauranac speak that year, the latter described the colors of the then-current map as “bilious.”) Info bubbles with connecting bus routes and the like proliferated—kernels of superfluous data insistently popping into one’s field of vision. The service guide—crucial in our three-tiered regime (weekdays, weeknights, weekends)—disappeared entirely, which Tauranac also called out. From Giuliani to Adams, ours was a long era of cartographic resignation.

And we believed we deserved it! Just look around (underground). With its prehistoric signals prone to ever more frequent malfunctions, its iron-age control panels that already looked out of date in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), its pizza rats run amok, the subway was a relic, a lawless underworld so worn down by budget cuts and unplanned obsolescence that only an anarchic antimap could do it justice. Instead of demanding something clear, functional, the envy of the rest of the world, we justified to ourselves the city’s drop-shadowed, high-fructose monstrosity, a map that told us too much and nothing at all.

The New York subway, of course, isn’t pre- or antimodern. Like every old network, it is a site of rich and glaring discontinuities. Flatscreenish open gangway trains glide under plaster ceilings un-pressure-washed since the Lindsay administration. Arrival clocks offer a discomfiting degree of accuracy even as epic delays and tangles persist in the vicinity of Crown Heights’ Nostrand Interlocking (though the MTA’s new five-year capital plan allocates funding for a definitive detangling). In our eternal, omnitemporal system, Rothko’s delicate subway paintings of the 1930s retain their core observational truth, while for some reason the G train tunnels will soon have Wi-Fi. Unlike our curbside garbage disposal methodology, which really was trapped in amber until Eric Adams wheeled a gray, plastic bin down the Gracie Mansion driveway, the subway, its overindulgent anachronisms notwithstanding, has consistently found ways to evolve.

Unveiled in April, the new subway map is—appropriately—not entirely new. It owes its essence to the 1972 Vignelli diagram and its raison d’être to his 2011 interactive digital update, The Weekender. (At the 2010 event with Tauranac, Vignelli took pains to distinguish the radical, self-evidently-reductive-at-all-costs simplicity of the diagram from the bureaucratic obligations of the lowly, bloated map.) Arriving a few years after Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica (2007)—in which Vignelli shows up as an especially eloquent talking head—The Weekender was a pleasant surprise from a transit agency not typically in the business of pleasant surprises. More than that, it suggested that somewhere in the MTA, someone was listening. Listening—and scheming about how to bring modernism to the masses again. That the vestiges of the Tauranac/Hertz map persisted for another decade and a half was predictable. That the new map emerged at all will always seem shocking.

And what a map it is! The debt it owes to Vignelli—and, by extension, to the GOAT Harry Beck, author of the first abstract map of the London Underground—does nothing to undermine its confident ethos, its congenital clarity. At once warmer, more user-friendly, and more rigorous than the Vignelli diagram, the new map is a distinguished and serious achievement. It is, I think, New York’s greatest work of modernist infrastructure since the Twenty-First Street–Queensbridge station (1989), or perhaps Dattner Architects’ Riverbank State Park (1993). The map is true to the system it depicts and the historical moment in which it depicts it. If Vignelli ’72 ultimately ventured too far into single-mindedness at the expense of legibility, child-of-Vignelli ’25 deploys a multitude of excellent design decisions in service of, well, service. A short and necessarily incomplete account of those decisions:

A nagging question intrudes: Do we deserve such modernism? Perhaps we can’t have elegant, intelligible things because our city is too messy to be tamed. It’s certainly true that the map depicts a New York subway system more orderly and stable than it really is. The service guide is back, but late-night and weekend routes are a bit less obvious than they were on the previous map, where they weren’t very obvious to begin with. It’s possible that as a result of this map a few more people will waste a few more minutes on a Saturday afternoon at Thirty-Fourth Street, waiting for an uptown B that will never come.

Possible, but unlikely. When I saw Vignelli speak, he mentioned that he and his team had originally proposed that subway maps be displayed alongside neighborhood maps and city maps on platforms, ensuring that riders would use each for its intended purpose. With the universality of smartphones, that vision has now come to pass, if in a desiccated, zombie-neoliberal sort of way. Locals and tourists alike are supplementing their wayfinding with an app, or a few apps at once. Bad news for humanity, but useful for a subway map, which in 2025 can afford to be less burdened and less load-bearing than at any previous point in the network’s history.

For once, we can allow ourselves to expect the best and actually get it. Or more than once? It’s hard not to read the city’s first new subway map since 1979 and its first socialist mayor since 1946 (fingers crossed) as happily entangled glimmers of civic hope. A transit map composed entirely of grace notes: What a way to inaugurate a new era!