![]() "But also I would go one step further, and think there would be a passenger input button," he said, "where the passenger can either on his iPhone or on the kiosk input a date and time in the future, and the map will then react with what the system will be like when the person wants to travel." He admitted he wasn’t sure whether such innovation was available yet or not. He said he envisioned real-time updates about service changes, route activity, and station conditions being made available to subway riders. "The big picture is critical."ĭ’Adamo, whose homespun tale of winning the 1964 contest to design a better subway map was the evening’s highlight, said he was optimistic about the future. "I frankly hate little maps on the iPhone," Tauranac grumbled. The veteran subway mapmakers on the panel, D’Adamo and Tauranac, were understandably skeptical about the death of their craft, especially as maps become more interactive and alive. It’s more than just getting from point A to point B." "It doesn’t mean that the cities are the same or that it’s a homogenous experience," he said. Jabbour, whose KickMap was considered and rejected by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 2007, advocated for a universal map with a consistent user interface that can be used in any city but still retain the unique features of each transit system. Similar to the first debate in ’78, two schools of thought emerged during the discussion: those who saw the current subway map as flawed, needing improvement, but ultimately necessary and those who think its relevancy was on the decline. Thankfully, 292 transit agencies around the world are now doing this, which will make it easier to navigate public transit systems in the future - especially ones that are coming apart at the seams like New York’s. Much still depends on slothlike organizations like the MTA to make their data available to the people who can turn it into cool products, she said. It means that we give the map context and purpose." We’re actually blue dots," said Sarah Kaufman, assistant director for technology programming at the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation, referring to the symbol showing your GPS location on a Google map. "We’re no longer just map readers, we’re no longer just map users or designers or creators. But they all agreed that with the advent of smartphones and the willingness of transit agencies to release more data to app developers, the future was clearly in the hands of the engineers rather than the cartographers. None of the participants in last night’s discussion - including Tauranac, whose highly readable, geographic map prevailed over Massimo’s cooler, aesthetic version to become the basis of the map still in use today Raleigh D’Adamo, whose 1964 map was the first to color-code the subway routes and Eddie Jabbour, a designer who helped create the popular KickMap app - were ready to declare print maps dead. In an age of Google and GPS, when smartphone ownership conveys the power to distill the most complex directions into a simple list of step-by-step instructions, the concept of the paper subway map never seemed more quaint. Rather than brood over color coding, station dots, or intertwining routes versus parallel lines, the question was now whether physical transit maps even mattered anymore. Last night, some of those same participants - their hair a little grayer, their backs slightly more bent - gathered in the college’s Great Hall again, but for a different kind of debate. (Was Central Park green enough? Was the East River blue enough? Since when was the East River blue?) Massimo, whose 1972 map thrilled design enthusiasts but mostly confused the public, said Tauranac's map made him want to "puke," and later thanked the moderator for helping him suppress “homicidal urges” toward his cartographical foes. In the other, those who preferred John Tauranac and his Subway Map Committee’s more geographic version. In one corner were supporters of Italian graphic designer Massimo Vignelli’s modernist, diagrammatic map of New York City’s transit system. For those too young to remember, the Great Subway Map War of 1978 pitted two schools of New York mapmaking nerds against each other in a heated debate in the Great Hall of Manhattan’s Cooper Union. ![]()
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