Tag Archives: NYC Subway

The importance of more & wider doors for future Metro railcars

CC photo from Stephen Evans

CC photo from Stephen Evans

This week, WMATA awoke to a nice present sitting under the tree. The first of the 7000 series railcars is here. These new cars will expand the fleet, increase the system’s capacity, and replace the oldest railcars in the system. All worthy ends, and all goals that the 7000 series will help meet.

However, like the economists pondering the economic inefficiency of Christmas, I can’t help but wonder what the 7000 series could look like if the gifts under the tree were exactly what you wanted. In that regard, the 7000 series design falls short. The good news is that there will be more railcar procurements in the near future.

The key shortcomings of the 7000 series are not technical (yet! we will need to see how they perform once in service), they are based on policy and assumptions about what a WMATA railcar is. Engineering-driven technical changes include a slight repositioning of the door locations and improved car body crash energy management.

At the same time, the assumption of the car design is to avoid changing the fundamental WMATA rail car concept (three doors per car, lots of seating for a commuter/metro hybrid). This means that the aesthetic changes to the 7000 series aren’t just about the end of Metro Brown. The altered door spacing and adherence to the original concept (three doors per car, three windows between each door) makes for awkward proportions – all in the name of leaving the original concept unexamined.

The good thing about assumptions is that they’re easy to change — once you change your mind. In California, BART struggles with the same legacy of operating a rapid transit/commuter rail hybrid. Despite the shortcomings of BART as a planning/construction agency, BART the operating agency is moving in the right direction. BART’s new rolling stock makes a couple of big changes, such as adding an additional door per car, embracing the rapid transit reality for the system.

Embracing the status quo is easy for any institution. That inertia is hard to overcome. Contrast BART’s changes to the most recent railcar procurement in Chicago, where the biggest changes are in the technical systems and seating layout.

I outlined some key ideas for the 8000 series in a previous post, but I wanted to put some numbers together to make the case for one of the most visible changes: wider doors, and more of them. The chart below summarizes the key dimensions from a selection of railcars:

Railcar Door Comparison

A Google docs spreadsheet with the above data is available here.

I chose the cars on this list for a variety of reasons. I mentioned RATP’s MP-05, used on the now fully automated Line 1 in Paris, and Toronto’s Rocket in a previous post. BART’s inclusion shows both old and new cars, demonstrating what can be gained from change. Using BART as a comparison point for WMATA is also useful due to the similar age and history of the two systems. And, as a counterpoint of traditional mass transit, I included examples of relatively new cars from New York’s A and B division.

Each of these examples represents a somewhat pragmatic choice; I wanted to include others but could not easily find online specifications on door opening widths. Basic dimensions on car/train length is easy to find, but door opening width is harder. Transport for London is one exception, with excellent online information from the agency itself, rather than from third parties. London’s new S7/S8 cars would be a good example to include, but TfL has not yet updated their rolling stock information sheet to include them.

Online sources:

The table shows  the impact of both the total number of doors, as well as the width of the doors. WMATA’s 50 inch doors are relatively narrow; all of the other examples are at least a few inches wider. The one exception is New York’s R160, but the R160 makes up for those narrow doors with overall numbers: Four door openings per 60′ rail car, compared to WMATA’s three doors per 75′ car. Each door on the MP-05 in Paris is 1.65 meters wide, showing how wide you can go – wider than WMATA by more than a foot.

The big reason to add doors is to improve/reduce station dwell time. The rightmost column illustrates the benefits of many wide doors: more space available to move between the train and the platform. When an 8-car WMATA train arrives at a platform, passengers must squeeze into 16.67% of the train to board/alight. Contrast that to the MP-05s used on Line 1 in Paris, where 32.9% of the train is available for passengers to pass through from train to platform. To put it another way, if WMATA wanted to offer that same permeability between the train and platform without changing door width, they would have to double the number of doors.

Line 1 in Paris is an exceptional case, where RATP is attempting to squeeze every last bit of capacity out of century-old tunnels. In the traditional rapid transit cases, each of the New York examples is greater than 25% door width to platform length. Toronto’s Rocket shows what WMATA would need to do to get to that standard: four doors per car, and modestly widen the doors to ~60′ per opening.

BART’s new rail cars won’t achieve the 25%+ of Paris, New York, or Toronto; but adding the third door to their new rail cars will beat WMATA at 19.3% and offer a substantial increase from the two-door model.

A simple re-evaluation of what WMATA’s assumptions about what a  rail car is can go a long way towards the goal of maximizing the capacity of the existing system.

Graphic standards on the Subway – a lesson for Metro as it evaluates the future of ‘Metro Brown’

Today, Second Ave Sagas linked to a digitized copy of Massimo Vignelli’s 1970 graphics standards manual for the New York City Subway. The photographed pages of the manual describe, in exacting detail, the graphic look and feel and philosophy of wayfinding signage for the Subway. While Vignelli’s schematic map (a scan of the map can be found here; discussion of the map’s legacy here and here; and for more from Vignelli himself, see this outtake from Helvetica) didn’t make it out of the 70s, his graphic legacy lives on through the system’s signage.

Henry Grabar wrote about the digital version of the manual in Atlantic Cities in March, adding some history to the conversation. One such change was the inversion of the standards from black text on a white background to the system’s current white text on a black background as a measure to discourage graffiti, though there are claims that white on black is more legible. On a temporary basis, some black-on-white signs have returned.

One of the more interesting pages from the manual shows how signs showing options should only appear at decision points along the way to a train – not before, and not after:

The text at the top of the page reads (out of the frame of the screen capture above, view the full page with magnification to read the text):

This diagram explains the sequence of information to the subway rider. It is a branching system that will lead him to his destination as directly as possible. The basic concept of this branching system is that the subway rider should be given only information at the point of decision. Never before. Never after.

All of the discussion about the manual emphasizes the power of standards. For a detailed history of New York’s struggle with diverse signage, see Paul Shaw’s online work, based on his book. The history of New York’s signage is understandably turbulent, but the level of coherency that comes through for users given the scale of the system is remarkable.

This puts Metro’s recent discussions about moving away from ‘Metro Brown’ into context. If any of New York’s standards look familiar, it is because Vignelli worked on both systems. Vignelli was a consultant to Harry Weese (architect), along with Lance Wyman (map designer), and reportedly was the one to coin the name ‘Metro’ and create the ‘M’ logo. Given the efforts in New York to standardize wayfinding signage, why move in the opposite direction now?

Wayfinding challenges for WMATA’s Rush Plus

WMATA’s recent service change, branded as Rush Plus (probably over-promising things just a bit as “rush hour reinvented”), involved deviating from Metro’s fairly straightforward delineation of lines and services via color.  Metro’s increasingly complicated service pattern is getting to the point of requiring a similarly robust nomenclature for services.

When a rider speaks of the Red Line, they refer not just to a set of tracks but also the service that operates on them.  Even this wasn’t perfect, as many Red Line trains wouldn’t operate for the full line – they would short-turn at Grosvenor or Silver Spring.  GGW’s Metro Map contest identified each of the separate services Metro regularly runs, counting ten current services, plus the future Silver Line.  Ten services is obviously more than the five colors on Metro’s map.

More problematic is the fact that color and line terminus are no longer paired.  Yellow line trains can terminate at both Franconia-Springfield and Huntington; Orange line trains can terminate at both Largo and New Carrollton.

When devising a new map to show these service changes and to prepare for the introduction of the Silver Line, Metro opted to keep the map (and service nomenclature) that riders know well the same.  However, the increasingly complex service pattern demands nomenclature to match.

WMATA’s move towards using colored bullets to help identify train services helps:

However, those bullets still only identify the all-day services, not the ‘Rush Plus’ services.  WMATA’s in-station signage uses something else:

YL Rush Only service bullet, GR bullet. CC image from justgrimes.

The striping within the bullet matches the pattern for such services on Metro’s new map, but it just doesn’t read well on in-station signage:

Rush Plus signage at Gallery Place-Chinatown. Photo by author.

From afar (or in the above case, just standing at the platform), you can’t tell the difference between the rush-only YL bullet and the regular service YL bullet.  Which means that the bullet isn’t useful for wayfinding if the rider still needs to focus on their terminal destination.  A different rush-only YL bullet adds nothing.

One potential solution would be to take a lesson from a system that has lots of different services, operating on different lines (both are distinct concepts) – New York.  Differentiation among similarly routed services can be accomplished via graphical means.

    

For some rush-only, peak-direction-only services, New York’s diamond bullets might work as an example for Metro’s rush-only services. Regular Orange Line trains [identified as (OR) in shorthand] would go to New Carrollton, while rush-only trains [identified with a diamond <OR> bullet] would go to Largo.

This wouldn’t solve all of Metro’s service naming challenges – the fact that some rush-only services bring new service to places (like more trains to Largo) while other services do not (how most Yellow trains at the peak end at Mount Vernon Square, not the ‘regular’ listed terminus of Fort Totten) and that some service patterns are not rush-only (short-turning trains on the Red Line at Grosvenor and Silver Spring) makes a simple switch difficult. Still, there’s a need to change.

This isn’t the first time this issue has popped up, and so long as Metro’s services are getting more (and not less) complex, it won’t be going away anytime soon.