A friend of mine sent me this video today in a brief email that basically said, "you're gonna love it." Naturally he was right. It's great. The 10-minute video is about how creative agency Work & Co rethought and redesigned New York City's subway map for today's digital age. Rather than a static map, which is historically how all cities have communicated their transit networks, they created a digital map that changes both as you interact with and as the network itself changes (closures, time of day, etc.). This means that they no longer had to make certain design compromises. They no longer had to choose between geometry (clarity of representation) and geography (accuracy of representation). The system does both.

Last week Oliver Moore of the Globe and Mail announced that Toronto mayor John Tory’s SmartTrack transit plan is evolving to feel less like SmartTrack and more like what Metrolinx had been planning all along.

Here’s the map from the Globe and Mail:

The 3 big changes are as follows (and numbered accordingly on the above map):

1. 

The western end of the line will be replaced by an extension of the Eglinton-Crosstown LRT (currently under construction) running from Mount Dennis to Pearson Airport. This is what was originally proposed.

2. 

The “U” running from Mount Dennis in the west, down through downtown, and up to Kennedy in the east is what remains of the original SmartTrack line and will operate as some sort of “heavy rail” service on existing GO Transit lines. The original election campaign plan was to run trains every 15 minutes, but that was deemed too infrequent to attract riders, so now Metrolinx and everyone is trying to figure out how to get it down to every 5-10 minutes and feel more like subway.

3. 

The extension north of Eglinton Avenue to suburban Markham (in the northeast) is being pushed out and will be dealt with sometime in the future. Keeping the first phase of SmartTrack south of Eglinton on both ends is beneficial in avoiding the issue of SmartTrack and the Scarborough subway extension cannibalizing each other. (In my opinion, this issue is a perfect example of what happens when transit planning becomes too political.)

The net result is a plan that is looking less and less like the original SmartTrack. I’m not complaining though because I have never been a big supporter of SmartTrack. I have always thought we should be focusing on the downtown relief subway line and on allowing Metrolinx to just execute on its regional express rail (RER) strategy.

For more on this topic, check out Steve Munro’s post, SmartTrack: Now You See It, Now You Don’t! He’s far more of an expert than I am on these sorts of issues.

This afternoon I rode Toronto’s new streetcar for the first time on my way home from Chinatown. I had been meaning to do it for weeks now, but this was my first opportunity.

The experience was infinitely better than what you get today on our current streetcars. I felt like I was in a new city. The proof-of-payment system makes onboarding much faster and the 4 loading doors means you just get on the train where there’s the most room – instead of getting on at the front and fighting your way to the back.

The other thing I liked is that they now have a map of our streetcar network within the train (see above image). Toronto never used to do this. For whatever reason, we didn’t like mixing subway lines with streetcar lines on the same map. 

But why be so pedantic?

For one thing, our subway map looks pathetic without these additional streetcar lines on it. So for the sake of Torontonian morale, please fill it up with what you can.

But the other reason why I think it’s important to include them is that we shouldn’t be thinking about our cities just in terms of specific technologies (subway, streetcar, and so on). Our cities are now multi-modal. Which means we navigate them using many different means, from subways and streetcars to bikes and Uber cars. What people care about is getting from A to B in the most efficient and enjoyable way possible.

This may seem like a subtle distinction, but it’s an important one. And maybe, just maybe, these new maps will serve as an important reminder to us that there’s a lot of fixed rail in this city and that it could be far better optimized if we just tried a little harder.