Everybody's Working For The Weekender

After years of complaints for the MTA to do something to help people understand the myriad of services changes and disruptions on an average weekend, they finally took some real action. Last week, the MTA reveal a new interactive weekend-only subway map called The Weekender, which takes over the home page of their website now Fri-Sun.

What is really cool is that they've utilized an updated version of the beautiful but damned Vignelli artsy map from the 1970s.  The map, which is similar to the ones in major cities like Boston, Washington and London, takes the disorder of the mammoth system and arranges it in sleek Modernist lines.  The problem was the lines don't really relate to the city's grid and, in the original, some stations were not located in the right spot geographically.  But with the interactive map, the mod map is used to show how the system is altered in a relativity clear manner, by blanking out stations not in service and "greying" out lines not operating.

It's a vast improvement over the previous alternative, which was trying to read the notices posted in the subway which were hard to decipher, especially at a glance.  Now if only they could limit the weekend work.  Unfortunately that's never gonna happen....the blessing and curse of a 24/7 system.