New York could get a reboot of the enduring Nineteen Seventies subway map, if it likes. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is at present testing an replace in 9 stations, together with Times Square and Grand Central; the MTA’s chief buyer officer Sarah Meyer tells the Wall Street Journal that it’ll exchange the present one if it goes over properly.

Unlike the present, extra geographically correct one, the brand new map strips out lakes and small islands, smushes Manhattan, and replaces the veiny community of tracks with a rectilinear schematic. Here’s the present one, in use since 1979:

It’s high quality.

And right here’s the brand new one, calling again to Italian designer Massimo Vignelli’s map, in use 1972-1979:

…which can be displayed alongside a geographically correct one for good measure:

The MTA’s chief buyer officer Sarah Meyer instructed the Wall Street Journal that she’s attempting to “introduce this map in a way that doesn’t cause fear, introducing it gradually so people can get used to it.” Fear feels like a wild response to a map, however redesigning the subway map is an explosive development in what’s turn into often called the map wars. People have proposed sluggish maps, with detailed landscapes labeling parks and neighborhoods, and quick maps just like the circles map that followers Manhattan and the boroughs out like a rainbow round Staten Island. There’s a map with no land at all and a extra inclusive map that tidily incorporates the Long Island Railroad and Jersey City. Each makes assumptions about how a lot folks have to know; if a vacationer asks for instructions, you may inform them to make a left, otherwise you can provide them 5 routes with restaurant suggestions.

The present map appears to have been designed with generosity in thoughts, conceived by tour information and historian John Tauranac, who’d had no skilled design coaching. Some designers contemplate it a humiliation, with strains so delicate that it’s important to ask somebody to maneuver their hair to decipher them. But the extra proportional, sprawling strains additionally give a extra lifelike estimate of how lengthy it takes to get to JFK, after which the main points recede into the subway automotive partitions. Its beige islands have light, rounded coasts on a form blue sea, a protected distance from Staten Island.

Soon, if New York goes for the replace, the Earth will flatten right into a Tetris block, numerous islands will sink beneath the ocean, and the Mob Wives will drift shut sufficient to hit Manhattan with a excessive heel. Vignelli’s original map is a design manifesto in effectivity over redundant realism. Striking. Timeless. Clear, shiny strains that straighten up the tangle of the dispersed monitor into tidy parallel angles. The association helped earn Vignelli a reputation as “one of the greatest graphic designers of the 20th century.” Later in life, he maintained that his map was “perfect.”

But the map additionally infamously edited irrelevant parks and condensed landmasses, to the extent that individuals left the subway disoriented; in 2006, the New York Times wrote that “[t]ourists were getting off the subway at the bottom of Central Park and trying to stroll to the top, for example, expecting a 30-minute walk.” Manhattan is chonky, and the airport is for ants. Neighborhoods the place the subway ends are gone.

The map argument was so contentious {that a} 1978 debate between the designers at Cooper Union inspired a book. Vignelli stated the brand new map made him wish to “puke.” Tauranac later instructed Gothamist that Vignelli “felt that he was above it all.”

In 2006, Vignelli instructed the New York Times that he didn’t want spatial accuracy as a result of that’s not the aim of this map. “Of course I know Central Park is rectangular and not square,” he stated. “Of course I know the park is green, and not gray. Who cares? You want to go from Point A to Point B, period.”

The sea is blue within the replace. Assuming folks don’t freak out, the timeline to retire the present one is unclear.