Design
An Encyclopedia of New York City Transit Design
Tickets, patches, maps, and timetables: a new book presents 150 years of Helvetica-heavy subway artifacts.
Welcome back from summer vacation, New York City: the subway still sucks. Thursday morning brought commuters some of the worst delays and crowding in months. Blame track debris and signal problems—the leitmotif in the symphony of failure this system presently is.
Perhaps it’s a good time for appreciations of what the subway was, and could still be: a vast network of humans, moving the largest city in the U.S. with astonishing speed and efficiency. That is one way to read New York City Transit Authority: Objects ($49.00), the latest edition in the Standards Manual series, a kind of library for government design enthusiasts published by the designers Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth.