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kottke.org posts about subway

Modernizing the NYC subway’s ancient technologies

This video from the MTA shows some of the vintage technologies that are still in use to control many of the NYC’s subway lines and how they are upgrading (ve. ry. slow. ly.) to safer and more reliable computerized systems. Some of control systems are more than 80 years old.

Whoa, after watching that, I’m shocked that the trains ever get anywhere at all. (via the kid should see this)

Update: The NY Times has a look at the political and logistical challenges related to upgrading the NYC subway’s antiquated infrastructure.

A computerized signal system like C.B.T.C. is also safer because trains can be stopped automatically. New York’s quest to install the new system began in 1991, after a subway derailment at Union Square in Manhattan killed five people. The train operator was speeding after he had been drinking.

More than 25 years later, the authority has little to show for its effort to install modern signals. The L line began using computerized signals in 2009 after about a decade of work. A second line, the No. 7, should have received new signals last year, but the project was delayed until the end of this year.

The process is complicated. It requires installing transponders every 500 feet on the tracks, along with radios and zone controllers, and buying new trains or upgrading them with onboard computers, radios and speed sensors. The authority also had to develop a design and software that was tailored to New York’s subway.

Over the years, the authority has kept pushing back the timeline for replacing signals. In 1997, officials said that every line would be computerized by this year. By 2005, they had pushed the deadline to 2045, and now even that target seems unrealistic.

40 years to upgrade the entire system? Embarrassing.


The stand clear of the closing doors guy

The New Yorker did a short feature on Charlie Pellett, the voice of the NYC subway.

This deep, sometimes vexing voice β€” which also apologizes for “unavoidable delays” β€” belongs to a man named Charlie Pellett. A radio anchor for Bloomberg News, Pellett was raised in London but cultivated an American accent by listening to the radio. His work for the M.T.A., which is done on a volunteer basis, is the only non-reporting voice-over work that he’s done.


In search of the longest NYC subway ride

Longest Subway Trip

The WNYC Data News Team is looking for the longest possible NYC subway ride. The MTA says the longest direct trip is 38 miles, but WNYC found one that’s 148 miles, requiring 45 transfers. They’re running a little competition to see who can find a longer ride…check the rules for more details (short version: you can repeat stations but not track segments). This is basically a variant of the travelling salesman problem, yes? Anyone care to take a crack at it? (via @ryandawidjan)


The real subway map of Manhattan

Real subway map of Manhattan

From Thrillist, the real subway map of Manhattan, your one-stop shop for Manhattan neighborhood stereotypes. (via @mkonnikova)


Color photos of the NYC subway from 1966

An exhibition by Danny Lyon of color photos he took in the NYC subway is being staged by the MTA. The photos have never been publicly shown before.

Subway 1966

Subway 1966

The trains shown in these two photos still run occasionally: just catch the M between 2nd Ave and Queens Plaza between 10am and 5pm on the two remaining Sundays in Dec.


How graffiti vanished from NYC subways

Nice episode of 99% Invisible on how New York City got rid of the graffiti on all of their subway trains.

For decades, authorities treated subway graffiti like it was a sanitation issue. Gunn believed that graffiti was a symptom of larger systemic problems. After all, trains were derailing nearly every two weeks. In 1981 there were 1,800 subway car fires β€” that’s nearly five a day, every day of the year!

When Gunn launched his “Clean Trains” program, it was not only about cleaning up the trains aesthetically, but making them function well, too. Clean trains, Gunn believed, would be a symbol of a rehabilitated transit system.

Remember, the train cars used to look like this:

Christopher Morris Subway


1980s NYC subway photos

You’ve probably seen Bruce Davidson’s photos of the gritty 1980s NYC subway, which were collected into a book published in 1986.

Bruce Davidson, Subway

Earlier this year, Time posted some previously unpublished photos of the NYC subway taken in 1981 by Christopher Morris, an admirer of Davidson’s.

Christopher Morris, Subway


Stand clear of the diving boards, please

I love this rendering of an abandoned Paris Metro station reimagined as a swimming pool:

Paris Metro Pool

This and several other renderings were created by OXO Associates for Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet’s Paris mayoral race. The others imagine subway stations turned into theaters, nightclubs, and underground parks.


Mini Metro

Mini Metro is an upcoming game in the style of Sim City, except you’re only building subway lines.

Mini Metro is an upcoming minimalistic subway layout game. Your small city starts with only three unconnected stations. Your task is to draw routes between the stations to connect them with subway lines. Everything but the line layout is handled automatically; trains run along the lines as quickly as they can, and the commuters decide which trains to board and where to make transfers.

However the city is constantly growing, along with the transport needs of its population. How long can you keep the subway system running before it grinds to a halt?

Oh man, this is great fun for transportation nerds. Site says it’ll be out in “early 2014” for PC, Mac, Linux, iPad, and Android. You can play an early version on the site or d/l an alpha version for OS X, Windows, or Linux.

Update: A public transit planning consultant evaluates Mini Metro, which because of its simplicity, simulates the experience of transit network design quite well in some cases.

We have discovered the most realistic thing about Mini Metro: If you want to win, think of these “trains” as buses.

In real rail transit systems, you cannot simply abandon a rail line and build a new one β€” certainly not just to handle an overcrowding problem. But to do well in Mini Metro you must revise the network repeatedly, and the last phase of the game you’ll deploy lots of one-time-only temporary lines In fact, for best results, make sure you also have a spare tunnel, so that if you have to get a train quickly to a station on an island, you can build a temporary line to a destination across the water, deleting it after use.

To a rail engineer, all this is ridiculous, but to a transit network designer, it’s the game’s most realistic feature.

Build a subway line to run one train once, then tear it out? No, this is not how rail transit works, but it’s very much how buses work, and it’s good thing, too. That’s why buses provide a much better sandbox for network design thinking. When you build powerful networks with buses, mistakes cost thousands rather than billions, so they’re more likely to be repaired. Real-life transit networks do need to evolve, usually from radial beginnings to more gridlike structures.

(via @spavis)


Photographing the Tube

For the past 40 years, Bob Mazzer has been taking photographs of the London Underground and its passengers.

Bob Mazzer

Bob Mazzer


Circular NYC subway map

A very pretty but almost completely useless circular map of the NYC subway.

Radial NYC Subway Map

There’s a London Tube version too.


Anagram map of the London Underground

Otter Bends, Queer Spank, Frog Innard, and Lob Horn are some of the stations on the anagram map of the London Underground.

Anagram London Tube Map


The quickening pace of modern life?

Ah, the good old days, when people used to talk to each other in public rather than looking at their phones or listening to headphones all the time. Except that’s not been the case for awhile as XKCD demonstrates with a series of quotes from various publications dating back to 1871. This is from William Smith’s Morley: Ancient and Modern published in 1886.

With the advent of cheap newspapers and superior means of locomotion… the dreamy quiet old days are over… for men now live think and work at express speed. They have their Mercury or Post laid on their breakfast table in the early morning, and if they are too hurried to snatch from it the news during that meal, they carry it off, to be sulkily read as they travel… leaving them no time to talk with the friend who may share the compartment with them… the hurry and bustle of modern life… lacks the quiet and repose of the period when our forefathers, the day’s work done, took their ease…

In 1946, a young Stanley Kubrick worked as a photographer for Look magazine and took this shot of NYC subway commuters reading newspapers:

Kubrick Subway Newspapers

The more things change, etc. More of Kubrick’s subway photography can be found here.


The subways of North America

XKCD has linked all the subway systems of North America into one map. That South Ferry to San Juan submarine line is a hike.


We found our son in the subway

File this one under crying at work: a man finds a newborn on a subway platform and he and his partner adopt him and then blub blub blub, I’m sorry I have to go there’s something in both my eyes and my nose.

Three months later, Danny appeared in family court to give an account of finding the baby. Suddenly, the judge asked, “Would you be interested in adopting this baby?” The question stunned everyone in the courtroom, everyone except for Danny, who answered, simply, “Yes.”

“But I know it’s not that easy,” he said.

“Well, it can be,” assured the judge before barking off orders to commence with making him and, by extension, me, parents-to-be.


Radio’s circuits shaped like London tube map

There’s not a whole not more to this radio than what it looks like, but I will forever have a soft spot for things that mimic the London tube map.

London Tube Radio

Now, if it contained vacuum tubes or something…


The A train: the Amazon of New York City

In a photo slideshow with jazz accompaniment, narrator Adam Gopnik takes us on a short tour of NYC’s A train, which runs from the top of Manhattan all the way out to the beaches of Rockaway.

From Harlem and upper Manhattan to Brooklyn, Queens and the Atlantic Ocean - New York city’s A Line subway route covers over 30 miles, takes two hours to ride from end to end, and is the inspiration for one of jazz’s best known tunes.

Here β€” with archive images and vibrant present-day photographs from Melanie Burford β€” New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik takes a ride on one of today’s A trains, and explores the communities living along the route.

(via @davehopton)


Kubrick rides the NYC subway

From the Museum of the City of New York, a collection of photos taken by Stanley Kubrick in 1946 of New York City subway passengers.

Kubrick NYC subway

The museum has in its collection more than 7200 photos taken by Kubrick of NYC while he worked as a photographer for Look Magazine. (via coudal)


Bruce Davidson, Subway

In an excerpt from the introduction to Subway, his collection of photographs of the NYC subway, Bruce Davidson recalls how he came to start taking photos on the subway in the 1980s.

As I went down the subway stairs, through the turnstile, and onto the darkened station platform, a sinking sense of fear gripped me. I grew alert, and looked around to see who might be standing by, waiting to attack. The subway was dangerous at any time of the day or night, and everyone who rode it knew this and was on guard at all times; a day didn’t go by without the newspapers reporting yet another hideous subway crime. Passengers on the platform looked at me, with my expensive camera around my neck, in a way that made me feel like a tourist-or a deranged person.


The NYC subway exits into a Brooklyn townhouse

Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG took some photos yesterday of a curious townhouse in Brooklyn Heights.

Fake Subway Townhouse

Curious in that the facade is 100% NYC rowhouse but it’s actually a secret subway exit. Here it is one Google Maps.


Subway waltz

Two NYC subway trains dancing down the tunnels…what a charming little video.

(via β˜…leela)


NYC subway exits into buildings

Noah Brier (and his commenters) are collecting NYC subway stations that open into buildings…like the BC stop that exits right into the Museum of Natural History.


Graffiti is a crime

From the NYC transit authority, a 1988 video about the consequences of painting graffiti in the subway.

Intense! (via β˜…vuokko)


Musical subway map

Alexander Chen made a version of the NYC subway map that plays music as the trains intersect routes.

At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.

Check out the full version; there are more details here. See also Isle of Tune. (via about 20 people on Twitter just now)


A tour of the abandoned Paris Metro

sleepycity has tons of photos of some old trains and abandoned Paris Metro stations and tunnels.

Old Paris Metro sign

(via @bldgblog)


The sweaty glass of the Tokyo subway

From photographer Michael Wolf β€” you might remember his Architecture of Density or 100x100 projects β€” a collection of photos of people pressed against fogged-up Tokyo subway windows.

Michael Wolf Tokyo

(via coudal)


The subway announcement lady

A profile of the woman who does the announcements β€” the ones you can actually understand β€” for the NYC subway. Since becoming “the voice”, she hasn’t actually ridden the subway.

On the telephone, her voice does not have quite as much oomph as it does on the subway. “My husband says he doesn’t hear the nice voice as often as he’d like,” she said.

But the nice voice cannot be disobeyed. Before 9/11, when they lived in Louisville, Ky., he drove to the airport to pick up her. He was early. He parked right in front of the terminal. He could hear her on the public-address system, saying no one was supposed to park there.

A traffic officer came along and said he had to follow the voice’s orders.

Her husband said, “I don’t listen to that voice at home; I’m not going to listen to it here.”


NYC subway photos, 1917-present

Slideshow of almost 100 years of photography of the NYC subway system by the NY Times.

NYC Subway 1940

The caption for the photo above reads:

1940: In a view north from 106th Street, only the supports of the old Ninth Avenue elevated line remained as the push to go underground continued.


NYC transportation event

This week’s Geeking Out, Gelf Magazine’s nerdy event series, is all about NYC transportation.

The evening will feature Benjamin Kabak (Gelf interview), author of popular subway blog Second Avenue Sagas discussing the MTA; Sharon Zukin (Gelf interview), author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, on gentrification; and Charles Komanoff (Gelf interview), creator of the Balanced Transportation Analyzer, discussing how to optimize the city’s transportation network.

Free. Sept 16, 7:30p in Dumbo. Click through for more details.


Job opening: NYC transit map designer

The MTA in NYC is looking for someone to keep their transit maps fresh.

As part of a two-person team, the incumbent of this position is responsible for the design and timely updating of NYCT’s printed and online map products, including the extensive service schedule panels on the reverse side of all “pocket” bus maps; researching and responding to map design and information issues; identifying, researching, recommending, and adapting evolving map drawing and production technologies; adapting Transit’s map products to the agency website and providing modified products for third party publications; advising on or producing custom maps for major agency initiatives and proposals; advising and assisting on other product design, graphics technology procurements and related staff training for all graphics services in Marketing and Service Information.

This has to be some kottke.org reader’s dream job…go get it!