Off the Map

Abstract

The New York City Subway is unusually fertile ground for transportation intelligence. It possesses a complex track network that allows trains to move along multiple overlapping routes, producing rare, and in some cases unique, qualities of rapid transit mobility. While its current information and computer technology (ICT) compromises the efficacy of those qualities, emerging smart systems promise not only to realize the full potential of what the Subway was built to do, but also to posit a new operational logic for it. The following is a provocation on urban mobility in the Information Age, a speculative reimagination of the Subway that considers a scenario in which, through the adoption of an advance mode of ICT, the Subway leverages the flexibility of its track network so as to forge a new logic of rapid transit. The provocation foregrounds the social implications of that logic, taking for granted the ability of technology to realize it. The objective is to catalyze critical thinking on transportation smartness at a time when technological hurdles are falling and social consequences are crystallizing. Its concerns include: how and why information is communicated to the public; how the public adapts to new modes of intelligence; how smarter environments both strengthen and weaken community; and, the collateral damage of optimization. Overall, it strives to illuminate a conundrum of smart transportation: optimization may both benefit the public and impair social vitality and environmental awareness.