I'm speaking from personal experience only, but the New York City Subway can be a pretty terrible place to be. It's smelly, noisy, and the stations are often damp and boiling in the summer. It doesn't have to be that way though. It can be better. It can change. And the fixes aren't difficult.
100 Ways To Improve The Subway is a neat little project from Randy Gregory II, a Master's student at the School of Visual Arts. Gregory completed the project this week, posting his 100th suggestion for improvement on New York's subway system, which carried 1.6 billion riders in 2012.
A lot of the suggested improvements are for common sense actions that can be done by regular riders, such as not hogging the seats and not using the railings as exercise equipment, but a good chunk are innovative technological and design ideas that can be implemented right now. And, as Dan Amira at NY Mag's Daily Intelligencer found out, Gregory has already met with a "senior member of the MTA" to discuss implementing them.
Here are some of the best suggestions we found for making your subway experience just a little bit more tolerable:
Now if only we could get rid of the people.
Topshot credit: MTA