The MTA redesigned subway map was released in April. It is adapted from the Unimark map (1972) by Massimo Vignelli, Bob Noorda, the Unimark International Corporation, et al., and the Weekender digital map (2011) by Vignelli, Beatriz Cifuentes, and Yoshiki Waterhouse.
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 tha…