MTA – The Map Room

New York City Subway Map Gets a Complete Makeover

Published on 2 April 20252 April 2025 by Jonathan Crowe

Photo: MTA Chair & CEO Janno Lieber, NYCT President Demetrius Crichlow, and Chief Customer Officer Shanifah Rieara unveil a major redesign to the New York City Subway Map at Times Sq-42 St on Wednesday, Apr 2, 2025. — Marc A. Hermann/MTA. CC licence.

New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has announced the first major redesign of its system map since 1979. The new map adopts a diagrammatic style, in common with most other transit maps around the world, for the first time since Massimo Vignelli’s controversial (and ultimately abandoned) 1972 map. Indeed, the MTA is openly acknowledging the influence of Vignelli’s design, along with the colours from the replacement maps designed by Michael Hertz.

The new map was designed by the MTA’s Creative Services Mapping Department and, like many major subway systems around the world, utilizes a diagrammatic style, employing bold, straight lines making it much easier for the eye to follow and more suitable for digital users. The white background, bold colors, horizontal writing and use of black dots make the map more ADA-friendly and easier for people with low-vision or cognitive disabilities to read.

Designers also focused on text legibility, keeping text on one line wherever possible and making better use of open space to alleviate crowding and using a black subway bullet with a white character to provide maximum contrast for easier reading.

A complete New York City Subway map from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. — MTA

This isn’t a complete surprise: the MTA started testing a map similar to this one in a few stations back in 2021.

I’ll be very interested to see how this new map will be received. The design of the New York subway map has been contentious for as long as I’ve been alive. Will it continue to be?

New York’s MTA Is Testing a New Subway Map

Published on 17 October 2021 by Jonathan Crowe

MTA Customer Information Pilot Maps — The MTA’s new geographically accurate (left) and diagrammatic (right) subway maps, now being tested at nine stations. (MTA)

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority is experimenting with new network maps that adopt a diagrammatic design that harkens back to Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 design, or (frankly) to designs used by most other transit systems. The new maps appear in nine subway stations side-by-side with geographically accurate maps of the MTA system, and embed QR codes so riders can submit feedback. If the maps are positively received, they could replace the MTA’s current network map—but New York being New York, and New York’s map wars being what they’ve been for the past fifty years or so, it’s anyone’s guess how this will shake out. More at Gizmodo.

New York City’s Live Subway Map

Published on 2 November 2020 by Jonathan Crowe

Screenshot of NYC Live Subway Map (MTA) — MTA (screenshot)

New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority has released a beta of a new digital subway map that aims to solve several problems at once. It shows train positions in real time and provides service bulletins in a single location. It also promises, says Fast Company’s Mark Wilson, to bridge the long-standing (and often acrimonious) divide between geographically accurate transit maps (Hertz) and diagrammatic network diagrams (Vignelli).

Here’s a video about how the new digital map came to be:

On Transit Maps, Cameron Booth has some criticisms of the map and its approach. “The main selling point of this map is that it has the clarity of a diagram but the fidelity of a geographical map—‘The best of both worlds!’ the articles happily proclaimed this morning—but the reality is more like ‘Jack of all trades; master of none.’ As much as I try, I simply can’t see any real benefit to this approach.”

Another point Booth makes, and I can confirm, is that the map isn’t just slow; it’s profoundly slow. On Safari it makes my current-generation, eight-core Core i7 iMac with 40 GB of RAM and a Radeon Pro 5500 XT feel like a snail; it’s a little better on Chrome, and on my third-generation iPad Air, but it’s still slow and janky and not very pleasant to use. Well, it’s a beta. But a beta that crawls on hardware faster than what most people own is, I’d gently suggest, not ready for release.

[Kottke]

Michael Hertz, 1932-2020: ‘Father’ of the New York Metro Map

Published on 27 February 2020 by Jonathan Crowe

Michael Hertz, whose design firm created the map of the New York City subway that in 1979 replaced a controversial (though critically acclaimed) design by Massimo Vignelli—a map that today’s map design largely follows—died earlier this month at the age of 87, the New York Times reports. See also BBC News, CNN, NBC New York, the New York Post—that’s rather a lot of attention.

That 1979 map that has been critiqued, fulminated against and re-imagined over and over again has nonetheless managed to become iconic; however much the map offended various design aesthetics, as the Times obituary (and previous coverage) shows, it was created with care and purpose: the curves were deliberate, the references to aboveground landmarks were deliberate. It was a team effort, but the Times obit had this interesting item about who should get the credit:

There has been some sniping over the years as to who deserves credit for the 1979 map, with Mr. Hertz taking exception whenever Mr. Tauranac¹ was identified as “chief designer” or given some similar title.

“We’ve had parallel careers,” Mr. Hertz told The New York Times in 2012. “I design subway maps, and he claims to design subway maps.”

In 2004, the Long Island newspaper Newsday asked Tom Kelly, then the spokesman for the M.T.A., about who did what.

“The best thing I could probably tell you is to quote my sainted mother: ‘Success has many fathers,’” Mr. Kelly said. “That’s not to disparage any work that anybody else put into the map. But, in all honesty, it’s Mike Hertz that did all the basic design and implementation of it. In all fairness, the father of this map, as far as we’re concerned, is Mike Hertz.”

The 1979 map isn’t quite the same as the current version. Transit Maps posted a copy in 2015, and has this to say about it: “It’s funny how we call this the ‘same’ map as today’s version, because there’s a lot of differences, both big and small. The Beck-style tick marks for local stations as mentioned above, no Staten Island inset, the biggest legend box I’ve ever seen, the colours used for water and parkland … the list goes on!”