Resurrecting this thread to post my opus reply to
@TheRatmeister,
@The EGE and
@Teban54's discussions in the sh!tposting thread. Yes, some of my discussion remains in the non-serious sphere of sh!tposting, but a fair amount of it is straightforwardly sincere, so I feel fine posting it here.
What if we renamed every single stop?
View attachment 62632
I've had this tab open for a month because I kept wanting to come back to this to reply, because I absolutely love this map. I agree with a lot of what has already been said in subsequent discussion, though I may highlight some particular points.
One thing I do really like about this map is how it ends up avoiding using street names for stations. This has emerged as such an overriding convention that we rarely seem to question it these days, but in my opinion it actually doesn't make a lot of sense. As a general rule, streets are not
places, they are
ways. There are obviously many many exceptions to this; for example, Newbury St is both compact enough and cohesive enough that it coalesces into a place (a sort of microneighborhood -- the kind of place that is sometimes branded a "District," e.g. "Newbury St District").
But most transit stations named after streets are named after
major streets which,
by definition, connect multiple places. It's inherantly imprecise, like being given only the latitude of your destination, unless you have some additional information that allows you to infer the longitude. (It also creates problems at transfers -- one service's "42nd St" is another's "8th Ave".)
My hunch is that this convention (insofar as it exists in North America) emerged from originating practices in New York and Chicago, and to a lesser extent Philadelphia and Boston. I've always been baffled how it can work to have, for example,
six stations named "Western", including two on the same line! But Chicago and Manhattan (and to decreasing extents, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens) all feature extremely strong street grids
and rapid transit routes that hew to major arterials. Particularly in earlier days, when it was more common to refer to "Eighth Avenue Locals" etc, the
line itself provided the second half of the
x, y coordinates. In that context, a street name is sufficiently disambiguating.
Philadelphia and Boston's early system demonstrate the related scenario where street names are less ambiguous: when there is only a single route along a particular dimension. Philadelphia had the Broad St El and the Market-Frankford Line forming a cross; Boston had the Washington St El and the Cambridge-Dorchester Subway, also forming a cross. In such networks, the entirety of, say, Dover St, will only have one station, which minimizes ambiguity.
However, note that three of those four examples still used the name of the arterial in the name of the service. And in Boston, the services that didn't -- the Cambridge-Dorchester Subway and the Charlestown El -- used almost no street names, instead using the names of squares.
Taken together, this points to street names only being suitable if one or more of the following conditions apply:
- The name of the arterial is included in the name of the service itself
- The service is the only one of its kind in the area
- The service hews so unflinchingly to a major arterial that it become inextricably associated with it in the mind of the riding public
The most jarring example where these conditions are not met is the New Bedford Line's Church Street Station. This station faces the additional challenge of scope, as
@The EGE put it: the broadness of a station name should reflect the broadness of the mode. Against the criteria above, only the second one applies, and that criterion is the weakest in my opinion.
("Church Street" is also puzzling because the eponymous street isn't actually a cross-street -- rather, it's one that runs parallel to the ROW for almost three miles. This makes me wonder if there are hopes for a "Church Street District", anchored by TOD in the large lots by the station. On paper, though, the station name seems incongruous, and I argue it's due to its failure to meet the criteria above.)
I think this is also why "Eastern Avenue" feels unsatisfying. Only the second criterion potentially applies, but that is diluted by the 116 having a stop at the other end of Eastern Ave; busway notwithstanding, the two services are very similar. On the other hand, it
is a difficult spot to choose a name for since it historically has been on the edge of Chelsea's residential neighborhoods. Even today, the majority of its surroundings are devoted to Logan parking. So I think it's simultaneously true that "Eastern Avenue" may be the best name for the stop and still be unsatisfying.
Anyway, enough of me going on about theory of transit stop naming. [
continued below]
