
The Manual That Dictates Every Detail of the NYC Subway - SimplyUseless
http://gizmodo.com/the-legendary-manual-that-dictates-every-detail-of-the-1572251522
======
asherkin
TfL have similar documents for London Underground which are a great read if
you're interested in this sort of thing.

Signage: [https://www.tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/lu-signs-
man...](https://www.tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/lu-signs-manual.pdf)
Station Design:
[http://www.persona.uk.com/nle/B-Core_docs/G/NLE-G1.pdf](http://www.persona.uk.com/nle/B-Core_docs/G/NLE-G1.pdf)

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ademarre
Is there a properly digitized PDF available anywhere? I appreciate what
[http://thestandardsmanual.com/](http://thestandardsmanual.com/) is doing
here, but their hover-photo-to-zoom thing is hard to read.

~~~
peterjmag
Not a proper scan, but still pretty decent:
[https://daringfawnyball.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/nyctaman...](https://daringfawnyball.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/nyctamanual.pdf)

via
[http://blog.fawny.org/2013/02/19/nycmta1970/](http://blog.fawny.org/2013/02/19/nycmta1970/)

~~~
ademarre
Nice. It looks like that PDF is made from the full-size images from
[http://thestandardsmanual.com/](http://thestandardsmanual.com/). I was about
to extract them myself until you pointed to this PDF. Thank you.

Did anyone else notice that ALL of the full-size images are pre-loaded with
[http://thestandardsmanual.com/page.html](http://thestandardsmanual.com/page.html)
? According to Chrome's Dev. Tools that's 378 requests for 109 MB!

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danso
FYI this is from 2014.

Since then, the OP created a Kickstarter for a reissue of the manual...I have
it sitting (awkwardly) on my bookshelf.
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thestandardsmanual/full...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thestandardsmanual/full-
size-reissue-of-the-nycta-graphics-standards)

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excepttheweasel
It's unfortunate that such a lovely document seems to have produced a terrible
subway system. Having regularly taken the subway in Beijing, London,
Washington D.C., Tokyo. The New York subway seems almost deliberately
difficult to navigate at times. Subway signs are often misleading. Lacking in
places or just outright missing. Perhaps they focused too much on the
appearance without considering usability.

~~~
fennecfoxen
The core problem is that the New York subway system isn't one subway system,
it's three:

Interboro Rapid Transit (IRT), which built a lot of elevated lines from the
Bronx into Manhattan (all the Manhattan lines have been torn down, including
the second and third avenue el, which were never replaced with the promised
Second Avenue Subway)... they ran shorter, narrower train cars and their
remaining lines turned into the 1234567 and Times Square Shuttle (internally,
the 0)

Brooklyn-Manhattan transit (BMT), which ran a bunch of trains into Brooklyn...

and the Independent Subway System (IND), which was run by the city with BMT
car standards and was responsible for the Manhattan portions of the ABCDEF
trains, the G, and the Rockaway Shuttle (internally the H) and bought a few
more rail lines in Brooklyn as well (the tail ends of the A and the F).

If you look up the maps, the places where the subway really looks awkwardly
constructed, the stations are sprawling, the tracks are at funny angles...
it's because they were competitors. Why does the 2/3 cross the L out in
Brooklyn without a transfer when the stations are right on top of each other?
They were run by competitors. Why do the F/A/C/G shun the other lines as they
plow through downtown Brooklyn? Why do you need to walk from the 6 to the F at
63rd Street? Why can't you transfer between the Hewes Street and Broadway (G)
stations if they're right on top of each other? Why can't anyone figure out
how to navigate Court Street? Why, for years, was there a transfer between the
BDFM and downtown 6 at Bleeker St, but not the uptown 6? (That silly little
bubble in the subway map.)

To this day there is _exactly one spot_ where an IRT train shares a platform
with a BMT train (Queensboro Plaza). And there are essentially two places
where trains transfer between the old IND and BMT tracks (at the Manhattan
Bridge, and Queens Plaza -- the third, under Central Park between the Q and
the F, occasionally figures in maintenance-related detours).

The good news is that New York is lousy with subway stations, and if there's a
disruption on one line, there's a very good chance you can still get where
you're going on another. The bad news is that's fundamentally confusing.

~~~
beejiu
You can argue much the same about London underground -- it too is a mishmash
of previously competing railway lines, and has grown in complexity to include
all manner of railways -- some cut-and-cover, some deep-tunnel, some
overground. For the uninitiated, it is a very complex system. The problem with
our system is that it has to inherit decisions made over 150 years ago in the
steam age.

~~~
fennecfoxen
The London Underground does have a few advantages over New York, though --
they were able to build deep tube lines with ease because of the geology (the
rock under Manhattan being much tougher to tunnel through). New York subways
are almost entirely cut-and-cover, which places substantial constraints on
where they run (under city streets, where you have to worry about nearby
basements, and water mains and the like) and how much space there is to
connect them to each other. This is also a reason they have more sharp curves
that make terrible metal-on-metal squeaking sounds.

London's tube stations have a lot of space between their platforms, enough to
provide a network of hallways with separate entrance and exit passageways and
escalators (some of them are equipped with switchable wayfinding signs so you
can have different ways out at morning and evening rush hour). New York
doesn't have anything like that anywhere; you'll often have a single set of
stairs from the street down to _one side_ of the tracks (with no provision for
transferring to the other side at all, to say nothing of elevators). If it's a
nice, modern station the tracks will be a little deeper so the station
entrance serves as an overpass over the tracks, but other times the transfers
will only be available by walking along another subway platform.

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Intermernet
> "If the manual had been designed today, documents like this wouldn't exist.
> They'd be nested within dense file trees, stored in data centers in
> anonymous buildings in rural parts of the world, and accessed through
> individual computers."

They do exist, and thanks to the internet, are more easily found than ever.
Many companies post their design guidelines, even if no external parties will
ever use them beyond looking at the final products:

[https://developer.nike.com/nikefuel/brand-
guidelines.html](https://developer.nike.com/nikefuel/brand-guidelines.html)
[http://hannahkimdesign.com/mcd_styleguide/](http://hannahkimdesign.com/mcd_styleguide/)
[http://guidelines.usability.gov/](http://guidelines.usability.gov/)

And some that _are_ used by people outside of the organisation:

[http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-
design/introducti...](http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-
design/introduction.html)
[https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserEx...](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/)

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weinzierl
The designer of NYC's subway map, Massimo Vignelli, has published a meta style
guide "THE VIGNELLI CANON".

    
    
        This little book reveals our guidelines - 
        those set by ourselves for ourselves.
    
    

It's only 49 pages and available for free on his website:

[http://www.vignelli.com/canon.pdf](http://www.vignelli.com/canon.pdf)

~~~
melvinmt
Thanks, I bought the paperback for $30 on amazon, had no idea it was also
available for free!

