With nerdy excitement, I rode home from work tonight on an R160B subway car. It’s a new model that’s being “revenue test”-driven this month, so I consider myself lucky for the preview.
Peering down the track1 at Penn Station, I noticed the train’s difference from most others before it even arrived. On the engine car, the R160B sports a glossy black fiberglass faceplate, yoke-shaped and reminiscent of certain cellphone designs. Very modern looking, for now. (View a photo here.)
What grabbed my attention once inside the car was the FIND (Flexible Information and Notice Display) System, a LED strip map that shows the rider’s relation to the next several stations (i.e. a graphical indication that a rider will arrive at Dyckman Street in two stops), as well as any route changes. I think the design is confusing; decide for yourself by viewing these photos. Each car has two (or was it three?) of these maps and they’re flanked by an LCD TV screen cycling basic route information with house commercials and static ads for the MTA. These screens were what really grabbed my attention for two reasons.
The first has to do with logos and design. Some background: older subway cars, which still make up most of New York’s fleet, have the line logo (i.e. the white-“A”-in-a-blue-circle logo for the A train) displayed on the face of the engine car and on the outside of all cars, usually via a low-tech rotatable backlit transparency. The newer cars, including the R160B, don’t have any “permanent” signage; inside and out, it’s nothing but LCD or LED screens. This makes sense. In effect, the MTA is moving even closer to creating a universal subway car that can run on any line2, merely changing all signage, as well as interior maps and line details, electronically.
A side effect of this is that the system’s colorful and iconic signage, which I wrote about late last year, seems in danger of disappearing from the cars. But wait: an interesting thing about the LCD screens inside the R160B is that they occasionally depicted a computer-generated white-“A”-in-a-blue-circle logo. Everything old is new again! Vignelli’s ’60s design makes it to the digital age!
The second attention-grabbing aspect of the screens is obvious. The MTA, with its perpetual budget woes, is all about generating revenue. I bet it added the screens with the eventual intent of broadcasting commercials. What advertiser wouldn’t want an audience as captive and diverse as one packed into a New York City subway car at rush hour?
1 As any New Yorker will tell you, this makes your train arrive faster. [back]
2 This isn’t wholly accurate. The lines of the New York City subway system originate from a patchwork of styles and eras. Cars on the lettered lines, for example, are longer and wider than those on numbered lines; the two groups aren’t interchangeable. But it was easier to refer to a universal subway car than it was to interrupt the flow by explaining stuff like I just did here. [back]