A Redesign of the Subway Map, From One of Its Designers

John Tauranac A new map of the New York City subway system designed by John Tauranac, who designed the map currently in use, shows lines that do not yet exist, like the Second Avenue Line. The new map is not, however, an official transit system map.

John Tauranac’s description of his new subway map mentions symbols like a little orange disc for outdoor stations, and a “no U-turn” icon that could be helpful if you overshoot a station and wonder whether you will have to pay another fare when you switch to a train heading back the opposite way.

Mr. Tauranac also notes that his map has a new typeface: Myriad, Apple’s corporate font since 2002, replaces Helvetica.

Only then does Mr. Tauranac mention that the new map shows subways that you cannot take. Not yet, anyway.

It shows the planned extension of the No. 7 line to 34th Street and Eleventh Avenue, which is not scheduled to be ready for passenger service until next June. It also shows the Second Avenue subway; its first phase is not scheduled to be completed until December 2016.

The still-to-be-completed lines appear in fainter colors than existing subway lines, but Mr. Tauranac said that showing the Second Avenue subway, in particular, was meant to be an eye-opener.

“The assumption is it will go down Second Avenue,” he said. But the map shows that it will have only three stops on Second Avenue, at 96th Street, 86th Street and 72nd Street. Then it will turn along East 63rd Street and run along the tracks that carry N and R trains.

Mr. Tauranac has had a hand in many subway maps of one kind or another since 1979, but was not the Anaximander of the subways. Anaximander, as every map-lover surely knows, is the pre-Socratic philosopher who is thought by some scholars to have devised the first map of the world. (He thought that the earth was shaped like a cylinder, but that the inhabited part was flat.)

So there were subway maps before Mr. Tauranac led a Metropolitan Transportation Authority committee that produced a redesigned map of the subways in 1979, the map that remains the basis for the agency’s current map.

But the agency had nothing to do with his new map. Mr. Tauranac and the M.T.A. parted ways in the mid-1980s; he says he was “declared redundant” by the agency.

A spokesman for the M.T.A. said it would start showing the longer No. 7 line and the Second Avenue subway on its maps “when they open.” But the route and station locations are already shown on the agency’s Web site.

Mr. Tauranac said he was still trying to redress “problems” that are now 40 years old, dating to the official map that preceded the 1979 map. That earlier map, the one that many found to be aesthetically pleasing, was somewhat lacking in precision.

“There was no attempt to show geographic perspective on that map,” Mr. Tauranac said. “Broadway at 50th Street was shown west of Eighth Avenue.”

“Bowling Green was north of Rector Street,” he added. “If you get out of the subway thinking Bowling Green is north of Rector Street, how are you going to find Rector Street?”

Mr. Tauranac published a “quasi-geographic” map in the 1990s, but it has been out of print for years, he said. Time for some modernizing, and not just about which trains stop at which stations.

In a world in which the “@” symbol has become ubiquitous, perhaps it is not surprising that Mr. Tauranac has found a use for it. He added a locator for the 72nd Street station on the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 lines: “Broadway @ Amsterdam Avenue.” A similar locator places the 66th Street station on the No. 1 line: “Broadway @ Columbus Avenue.”

For the 72nd Street station, he said he wanted to make clear the kinds of details that bleary-eyed morning commuters probably do not notice: Uptown cars and buses, on the east side of the station, are actually on Amsterdam Avenue (the downtown traffic is on Broadway).

As for the 66th Street station, he said, one entrance to the No. 1 line is on Columbus Avenue.

One problem he did not try to straighten out was at Columbus Circle. “If you are standing on the corner of 59th Street and Eighth Avenue,” Mr. Tauranac said, “or the corner of Central Park West and Central Park South, you’re not going to find a street sign that says 59th Street.”

But he did deal with the West Fourth Street station, which has no entrance or exit on West Fourth Street.

“I said West Third to Eighth” in a locator line below the station’s name, he said. Or in the space-constrained language of his map, “W 3-8 Sts.”