The quest to build a better New York City subway map has become something of a competitive sport—and like all competitive sports, it gives us something to talk about (and, occasionally, complain about). The latest entry into the transit design canon: a new map from Paris-based designer Jug Cerovic, who’s revised his 2014 version to make his vision of the city both clearer and more geographically accurate.
“The two main criticisms [of the 2014 map] were about topology and line colors,” Cerovic told Gothamist. “The problem was I had squeezed Brooklyn into the squared layout of the map and hugely distorted its shape with Coney Island ending all the way east at the same 'latitude' as Downtown [Manhattan]. I realized this was unacceptable and I therefore enlarged the layout to be able to fit Brooklyn in a topologically accurate way, on a diagonal axis. It works much better.”
The other big change here is the handling of the subway line colors. In the 2014 map, Cerovic had, reasonably but also extremely confusingly, made the B and D lines magenta, “to differentiate them from orange F and M lines which share the same route in Manhattan.” He has since realized the error of his ways. “This was clearly an unacceptable move and so I reverted to portraying all the lines with their usual colors,” Cerovic told Gothamist. “Works well now.”
The newly tweaked NYC map is part of a bigger project to redesign mass transit maps for 40 international cities. For transit fans and the people that love them, Cerovic is offering hardbound copies of the maps via Kickstarter.
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