It’s about to be over, the idea that a car can runs free. Those days are about to close.
It’s a little like making a model of New York City at the turn of the last century and you’re modeling horse buggies everywere and then automobile is about to arrive. Something else is about to arrive.
This is a project that dramatically recreates the overwhelming experience lots of cars moving very quickly in a twisted, complicated infrastructure of roads, buildings and rails. All of the moving parts contribute to the sculpture’s “noise pollution,” mimicking the effects of real cars in the real world.
It was about trying to evoke the energy of the city.
And then the stillness that follows when the whole thing turns off.
NJ Transit unveiled a the newly redesigned rail map on Wednesday. The most striking features are New Jersey’s weirdly morphed geometry, and cramped layout of lines nearest to New York City where the network is most dense.
The map was done by an in-house design team, and the final result helps reinforce Erik Spiekermann’s point that government agencies are awful design clients:
We have great architects, we have great designers, we have great engineers. We don’t have clients. What we need is culture of clients.
There are plenty of talented (and opinionated) designers who would kill to work on a project like this, but there doesn’t seem to be any impetus for agencies like NJT to invest additional resources in design. Complications like budget and hiring processes undoubtedly make it challenging — maybe impossible — for the NJT to hire a professional designer. I’m also sure that one of the biggest fears is likely that a pro designer would make something too “design-y,” high-brow, abstract, indulgent or inaccessible to most people.
Sure enough, “over-designed” is exactly what happened with Vingelli’s 1972 map, which squished NYC’s geography and made Central Park look like a small square. From Visual Complexity:
The result was a design solution of surprising beauty. However, Massimo Vignelli reached a level of abstraction that quickly ran into problems. To make the map work graphically meant that a few geographic liberties had to be taken. For instance, Vignelli’s map represented Central Park as a square, when in fact it is three times as long as it is wide. It is said that Vignelli had planned a second, complementary map that would have been more tied to the actual above-ground geography, but the city never let him do it.
It’s still debatable whether or not people would have eventually figured out Vignelli’s abstract leap of faith, but that leads to a bigger question: Are public transit maps a forum for adventurous design moves? And how do we define “adventurous”?
All that said, I’m an apologist for government transit agencies. Whether or not they have a good handle on visual information design (which I think ultimately stems from having someone in charge with good design taste), they’re doing the best they can. Releasing an updated version shows that NJT is cognizant of helping customers figure out where they’re going. And the MTA, despite the persistent news budget troubles and service interruptions — still gets a lot of people from here to there and wants to do better, and is always tweaking their map.
Far from being the paradigm of customer friendliness that was promised, this map comes across as sad, tired and amateur.
I feel that there has to be a better solution than this, where the light rail systems around Hoboken and Newark are crammed into a tiny space with miniscule station names, while vast amounts of space remain empty throughout the rest of the state.
Unfortunately, despite its best intentions, this map is hideous.
Still, despite the upgrades, there’s no small bit of state-based protectionism involved. While the PATH system gets its day in the sun and the Port Jervis line branches into New York, New Jersey Transit pays scant attention to SEPTA’s connection from Trenton to Philadelphia and beyond. Transit networks are regional, but this map doesn’t extend far beyond the borders of the Garden State.
