New York City Subway map

Massimo Vignelli and Joan Charysyn's 1972 diagram, and its 2025 successor The most loved and most argued-over subway map ever made. Unimark's 1972 diagram used clean geometry and bold color, and it gave up geographical accuracy for clarity. Many New Yorkers disliked how it distorted the city above, and in 1979 it gave way to Michael Hertz Associates' more geographic map, which lasted 46 years. The ending is the interesting part. In April 2025 the MTA's in-house mapping team unveiled its first full redesign since 1979, a diagram of bold straight lines that commentators immediately compared with the 1972 map. Read together, the two maps are a 50-year debate about what riders need most.