Tag: transportation

On New York Subway Map’s Compounding Travesty

Pedestrians on Broadway in this area can stumble upon an Ivy League university or gaze through the windows of Tom’s Restaurant, of “Seinfeld” fame. They can find a copy of “Pride and Prejudice” for $2 at a stand on West 112th Street, and, four blocks south, a taco for 50 cents more. They can even sip mojitos at Havana Central at the West End, near West 114th Street.

But they will never find West End Avenue between Broadway and Riverside Drive.

Mr. Tauranac, who has for years assailed Mr. Vignelli for such inaccuracies as having Bowling Green north of Rector Street, said the revelations had forced him to re-evaluate his harsh judgments of Mr. Vignelli, 81. “It really has dulled my attack, that’s for sure,” Mr. Tauranac said.

Moments later, he retrieved from his office the May 2008 copy of Men’s Vogue, featuring an updated Vignelli map “every bit as terrible a map as he designed in 1972,” to Mr. Tauranac’s eye.

“I’m happy to see that he’s mellowing,” Mr. Vignelli said.

via On New York Subway Map, a Wayward Broadway and Phantom Blocks – NYTimes.com.

The current map is an abomination of design, the revelation of more mistakes just compounds the existing travesty. Not that Vignell’s 1972 map is any better with oversimplification, a precious use of color and lines rendering it more art piece than functional map or diagram.

Vignelli 1972 Map

It seems every designer is trying to reinvent Harry Beck’s amazing diagram for both the Paris Metro and the London Underground:

The problem being that Beck’s Underground Map is uniquely suited to London’s system, not New York City subway’s combination of express/local lines, geography and history of being composed of three different subway companies.

See also

British Rail Corporate Identity, 1965-1994

HST Diesel electric power car Class 253

In 1964 the Design Research Unit—Britain’s first multi-disciplinary design agency founded in 1943 by Misha Black, Milner Gray and Herbert Read—was commissioned to breathe new life into the nation’s neglected railway industry, the corporate image of which had remained largely unchanged after its nationalisation in 1948, a reflection of a largely disjointed and out-of-date transport system. The company name was shortened to British Rail and Gerry Barney of the Design Rearch Unit conceived the famous ‘double-arrow’, a remarkably robust and memorable icon that has far outlasted British Rail itself and continues to be used on traffic signs throughout the United Kingdom as the symbol for the national rail network and more specifically railway stations on that network. The new corporate identity programme was launched in January 1965 with an exhibition at the Design Council, London. The corporate identity consisted of four basic elements: the new symbol, the British Rail logotype, the Rail Alphabet typeface and the house colours.

– British Rail Corporate Identity from 1965–1994

Michigan Central Station

Ice Roads. (Detroit, MI)

Built in 1913 for the Michigan Central Railroad, Michigan Central Station (also known as Michigan Central Depot or MCS), was Detroit’s passenger rail depot from its opening in 1913, until the cessation of Amtrak service on January 6, 1988. At the time of its construction, it was the tallest rail station in the world.

Escape

Michigan Central Station (HDR)

Michigan Central Station

Los Angeles Union Station Master Plan “Vision Boards”

In April 2011, Metro completed the acquisition of Union Station and the approximately 40 acres surrounding the historic rail passenger terminal. As part of the Los Angeles Union Station Master Plan, the six short-listed teams were required to submit one Vision Board showing a high-concept vision for Union Station in the year 2050. The Vision Boards are not part of the formal evaluation process, but rather a means to begin the public engagement process and ignite inspiration about Union Station as a multi-modal regional transportation hub. The Vision Boards were presented to the public at a viewing event on April 25th, 2012.

The short listed teams all include multiple firms, and are led by the following prime contractors:

  • EE&K a Perkins Eastman Company/UNStudio
  • Gruen Associates/Grimshaw Architects
  • IBI Group/Foster+Partners
  • Moore Ruble Yudell Architect and Planners/Ten Aquitectos/West 8
  • NBBJ/ingenhoven Architects
  • Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW)/ Parsons Transportation Group

All six teams are required to do the following during the master planning phase:

  1. Data Collection and Analysis
  2. Preparation of Draft Alternatives
  3. Final Preferred Plan and Implementation Strategies
  4. Public Outreach (throughout the process)
  5. Project Administration (throughout the process)

Metro is in the evaluation process and will bring a recommendation for the USMP consultant team to the Board of Directors on June 28th, 2012 with public announcement on or around June 17th.

Below are the Vision Boards:

It’s all about the headways. Period

Part of the conventional wisdom about transit which prevents spending real money on quick headways is that “There’s no market. People aren’t using that route. Why should we be running empty buses?”

My quick answer to that old saw is that just as with roads, with transit, supply induces demand. If you offer a rich ‘connection pipe” (to garble Walker’s terminolgy) then people will use it and people will get used to the service and presto you have political support. People support things (politically) that they use.

It's all about the headways. Period. – City Comforts, the blog.

Government Accountability Office says Chris Christie lied about Access to the Region’s Core

the tunnel project study map

For those of you following at home, we have been following the trials and tribulations of the now canceled Access to the Region’s Core transit rail tunnel – a new pair of tunnels under the Hudson River for New Jersey Transit. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie famously canceled the project in favor of shifting the more than $4 billion to the road transportation trust fund, eliminating the need to raise gas taxes (presently one of the lowest in the nation). The New York Times reports that Report Disputes Christie’s Reason for Halting Tunnel Project in 2010:

The report by the Government Accountability Office, to be released this week, found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.

Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey’s share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs.

In fact, the GAO report1 makes clear that the State of New Jersey was on the hook for 32% of the total cost – less than half of Gov. Christie’s exaggerated claim.2 The report also makes clear that the project cost did not materially change, but rather was being refined as more detailed information came to light.

While ARC had some flaws – chiefly being composed as a deep-cavern terminal which was not directly connected to the existing Penn Station – the project was necessary to relieving the Hudson River crossing bottleneck: currently one 15-minute train disruption in the existing tunnel can delay as many as 15 other NJT and Amtrak trains. The chief beneficiary was New Jersey Transit riders who would now have a one-seat ride to Manhattan; secondary effects would be less cars on the road (meaning faster commutes and less pollution) and an increase in demand for housing in New Jersey communities close to NJT stations. All of this was a net-positive for New Jersey.

But Governor Christie3 killed the project under the aegis of fiscal responsibility, but was really all about keeping taxes low:

Canceling the tunnel, then the largest public works project in the nation, helped shape Mr. Christie’s profile as a rising Republican star, an enforcer of fiscal discipline in a country drunk on debt. But the report is likely to revive criticism that his decision, which he said was about “hard choices” in tough economic times, was more about avoiding the need to raise the state’s gasoline tax, which would have violated a campaign promise. The governor subsequently steered $4 billion earmarked for the tunnel to the state’s near-bankrupt transportation trust fund, traditionally financed by the gasoline tax.

Canceling ARC was nothing more than a naked political gambit, and the GAO called the Governor on his deceit. In Gov Christie’s world, it is better to spend the money on short-term gains, than to invest in an infrastructure project which would create long-term stability in a state which depends on New York for its survival.

At what point do we carve the New York-Connecticut-New Jersey MSA4 out of New York and New Jersey to create the 51st State – the State of New York City? Because trying to coordinate rational land use and transportation policy across state lines is not working at all.

State of NYC map

  1. Potential Impacts and Cost Estimates for the Cancelled Hudson River Tunnel Project, GAO-12-344, Mar 9, 2012 ↩
  2. Table 2: Proposed Funding by Source, as of April 2010, page 19 ↩
  3. I originally so much wanted to call Governor Christie the Corpulent King of Jersey, but that didn’t sound nice. So here it is, in a footnote ↩
  4. What’s a Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Area? ↩