2009-11-06
post/234918840
New York LED Subway signage. This is amazing but if it was introduced in London, someone would probably just scrawl a cock on it. (via Big Spaceship)
I believe (but can’t find a reference on the Internet; I must have read it in a book) that the Design Research Unit experimented with backlit strip maps for the Victoria line stock in the 1960s, but had to abandon it, because maintenance would have been too expensive (and too necessary- the lights weren’t reliable). I imagine that given the technology of LEDs, they’d be able to make something like this work.
Having said that, I suspect that this might be a one-off trial device, not a full production run. (I wish there were more detail on either Vimeo or Flickr). Meanwhile, it is a nice solution to the way the New York subway runs multiple lines with the same stock down the same physical tracks, which has meant until now that strip maps often weren’t practical.
