Eddie Jabbour, the creator of the KickMap, a subway app, told Berman that the M.T.A. that he had created his map years earlier, and that he would not comply with the agency’s order. “He alleged that I had ripped off the Weekender,” Berman said, referring to an obscure online map that the M.T.A. Last month, though, he got a notice from Etsy, saying that the M.T.A. He has earned a few thousand dollars selling it online. ditched it after seven years, considering it too abstract.īerman’s map is suavely graphic, like Vignelli’s, but it also adheres to the city’s geography. The map is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, but the M.T.A. Then came Massimo Vignelli, an Italian designer who drafted a map that was crisp, beautiful, and easy to read, but defiantly indifferent to geography. To create the first color-coded subway map for New York, in 1967, transit officials brought in a former rocket scientist, who devised four prototypes instead of choosing one of them, the officials mashed two together, resulting in a much hated composite. Trying to explain the workings of a megacity’s transit system with elegance and accuracy is about as easy as describing the city itself. He listed the map himself, at a starting price of fifty dollars. Two years ago, he discovered that, after he’d posted his New York subway map on Wikipedia, in 2009, someone had begun selling it on Etsy. (He rendered all of “Star Wars” into a diagram.) “Frustration is a great way to become creative,” he said. He has since revised his map and designed some for other cities, and even for science-fiction epics. He got so angry that he designed his own map, spending hundreds of hours on it and joining the ranks of New York’s amateur transit cartographers. The whole thing ends up being a slightly dramatic fiasco.”īerman gave up on the date he later learned that the B doesn’t run on weekends, a detail that he couldn’t find on the map. “Here I am, waiting like an idiot for half an hour, and there’s no B,” he recalled. After consulting the subway map, he decided to take the B train from West Fourth. Berman, a transplant from San Francisco, was at N.Y.U.

“I designed a subway map-a competitor that the M.T.A. Berman began to relay precise directions then he stopped.

subway map on a wall of the West Fourth Street station, when an elderly tourist asked him how to get to Chelsea. Jake Berman, a midtown lawyer, was recently examining the M.T.A.

Mta live map