How the NYC Subway Should Work
I wrote a little bit about this after visiting San Francisco but spending time in New York has made it even clearer.
Right now the New York City Subway has a series of train lines (named A, B, C, 1, 2, 3, and so on) which each make a different combination of stops.
Sometimes construction or accidents or other things require trains on one line to make an abnormal series of stops. This leads to philosophical paradoxes like “This is an F train running on the N line and making all N stops.” (If it’s on the N line making N stops then how is it an F train?)
Some lines are express versions of other lines (e.g. the 2 makes a strict subset of 1 stops for most of Manhattan) but during peak times some lines also “go express”, skipping stops they would otherwise make. During late nights, sometimes the reverse happens.
All of this is very confusing to the novice traveller. But it could all be made very simple with just one change: name groups of stops, not groups of trains.
Right now you take a 2 train to Chambers St. The train only has one affiliation (to the 2 line) but the stop is affiliated with many lines (it is served by the 1, 2, and 3).
I would reverse this. The stop now just has one affiliation (let’s call it X), while the train can have many (it might be making X, Y, and K stops).
Now if I want to go to Chambers St., I just look at the map and note it is an X stop and then get on any X-stop-making train. If the train is only making X stops, it’s obviously going to be faster than one making X, Y, and K stops. If it is no longer making X stops due to construction, I know I need to adjust. If I’m telling a friend to meet me, I just say “find an X train” instead of “take a 1, 2, or 3 train”.
Further, right now situations like “this train makes 4 stops in the Bronx but 5 stops in Brooklyn” are very confusing (the 4 and 5 make the same stops in Manhattan) but often happen due to vagaries of traffic, etc. Under this system they wouldn’t even be an issue: normally you’d run X-Y-K trains but today you’d be running X-Y-P trains as well.
I can’t see any disadvantages to the system, so I think naming the lines this way was simply a mistake, caused by the fact that the MTA must dig physical tunnels between stops (and thus it seems plausible to name the trains after them) even though passengers only care about the stations.
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