Last year the subway system introduced a new map — or perhaps it had already begun phasing it in before 2025 and I only noticed when the old one had mostly disappeared.
That old one — the map that replaced the 1972 Vignelli diagram — had been with us since 1979. Designed by Michael Hertz Associates, it became simply the subway map. It lasted more than forty-five years.
And yet, to me, the definitive New York subway map is still the Vignelli map.
Which is odd.
Because it was only in use for seven years.
Abstraction
The Vignelli map was beautiful — provided you already knew where you were going.
If you knew you needed the F to West 4th Street, it was perfect. The design was schematic, rational, almost electrical. Lines ran at 45- or 90-degree angles. The subway looked like a circuit board. It felt solvable.
It treated the subway as a system.
It did not treat New York as a city.
Distances were abstract. Central Park was a tidy shape. Boroughs were compressed or widened. Landmarks were mostly absent. If you were trying to understand where things actually were in relation to each other above ground, the map could mislead you.
I learned that the hard way.
Woodside and the Popsicle Sticks
Still during the Vignelli era, I decided I needed to go to an art supply store in Woodside to buy popsicle sticks for some craft project. I don’t remember how I figured it out, but I determined which stop on the 7 train was closest and concluded that it would be a short walk.
The map seemed to confirm this.
I got off the train and started walking.
And walking.
And walking.
Eventually I reached the store and bought my popsicle sticks, but the walk was much longer than I had anticipated. The map had flattened distance. Stations that appeared neatly spaced were not, in fact, equidistant in real life. And Queens, with its relatively sparse subway coverage compared to Manhattan, has a way of stretching space between stops.
The Vignelli map had made the trip look like a hop.
Reality was a hike.
It was a beautiful system diagram. It was not a pedestrian guide.
The Hertz Correction
The 1979 redesign tried to fix that. The Hertz map overlaid the subway lines onto something resembling actual geography. Shorelines curved. Subway lines curved. Parks looked like parks. You could approximate direction and distance.
It also introduced one of the system’s smartest ideas: trunk-line color coding through Midtown Manhattan.
The B, D and F were orange because they ran on the Sixth Avenue trunk.
The N, Q and R were yellow because they ran on Broadway.
The 1, 2 and 3 were red; the 4, 5, 6 green; the A, C, E blue.
The color didn’t belong to the letter. It belonged to the trunk.
Which meant the letters could change color.
The Q has not always been yellow. From 1988 to 2001, when it ran via Sixth Avenue, it was orange. The V — which existed for just under a decade, from 2001 to 2010 — was orange for the same reason. The M used to be brown, part of the old Nassau Street trunk, before rerouting through Sixth Avenue turned it orange.
Even the Q’s name is historical shorthand. It descends from “QB” (“Brighton via Bridge”), alongside QT (“Brighton via Tunnel”) and QJ (“Brighton to Jamaica”). Historically, the Brighton Line in Brooklyn was the Q. I wish I could end this paragraph with the snarky observation that today’s Q doesn't go to Brighton anymore. But it does.
The W, despite what my memory occasionally insists, has always been yellow. Broadway. My recollections are not immune to rerouting.
The Loss of Purple
As a kid, I did not think in terms of trunk-line logic.
I thought in terms of identity. I thought of the F as my train.
The F used to be purple.
It was a beautiful purple. Distinct. Singular. Royal.
Then trunk-line standardization arrived and the F turned orange, joining the B and D. Meanwhile the E — which I irrationally regarded as a rival — remained blue (though a darker shade).
This felt like betrayal.
I understood that color now signified shared Manhattan infrastructure. But I also knew was that the F had lost something beautiful. The 7 train became purple, and it has remained so ever since.
Clutter and Compromise
The Hertz map’s weakness was the inverse of Vignelli’s. It tried to show everything. Geography. Water. Parks. Bus connections. Street grids. Transfers. It was useful — and sometimes cluttered.
The new map introduced in 2025 appears to be an attempt at compromise. It returns to schematic clarity — strong geometry, simplified layout — while preserving trunk-line color coding. Instead of a single thick orange band in Midtown, multiple orange services run in parallel. It is less geographic than Hertz, more geographic than Vignelli.
It tries to split the difference.
The First Map Is the Real Map
The Vignelli map lasted seven years. The Hertz map lasted more than forty-five.
And yet the Vignelli map is the one in my head.
It was the map in use when I first became fascinated with the subway — when tracing colored lines across boroughs and memorizing station names felt like decoding a secret system. It made the city look legible.
When I was young, I found it odd that the map wasn’t redesigned every few years. Why not refresh it like baseball cards? Why not issue new editions, with completely new designs?
It took adulthood to realize that redesigning infrastructure costs money. Stability matters. A transit map is not a collectible.
It is a working tool.
I’m not entirely convinced the system needed this latest redesign. But maps are arguments about what matters — clarity or fidelity, abstraction or realism, system or city.
In the end, the definitive subway map is the one you first learned to read — the one that made you believe the city could be understood.
Even if it occasionally left you walking much farther than expected for popsicle sticks in Woodside.
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