How Boston's MBTA train lines got their colors | The Curiosity Desk
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- Опубликовано: 1 ноя 2024
- The T wasn’t always the colorful affair it is today. The now iconic color-coding scheme for Boston’s subway system was introduced in the 1960s - the brainchild of a local design firm, CambridgeSeven. And each of the colors chosen for the lines - blue, green, orange and red - was selected for a specific reason. In this episode we explore how the T got its colors and talk with riders as to their theories about what each of those colors means.
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More T history: www.mbta.com/h...
Correction: 2:12 This video incorrectly refers to Orange Street as Orange Way. We regret the error.
Correction: @ 2:12 This video incorrectly refers to Orange Street as Orange Way. We regret the error.
"A lot of people on the Red Line are just angry all the time" I mean he's not wrong
Usually that's the *southern* part of the Red Line, oddly enough, opposite from Harvard.
Also, commuter rail is purple for a royal historical nod.
Interesting! I didn't realize that.
Learned about this from George Osborne, former mbta historian. He was a pretty interesting guy
Does he have an RUclips channel?😊
@@career5690 I think he passed away almost twenty years ago?
@@MrCantabrigian oh 😢
Sorry to see a trusted Boston institution like WGBH repeating "retrofitted" history. The T's website clearly states only the Blue and Red Lines received their colors based on the given reasons. Selection for the Green and (eventually) Orange Lines was a toss-up. Purple was merely the next color in Cambridge Seven Associates' chosen palate. This is clearly stated on the T's website, which also contains some of the older maps shown. Boston Region MPO Cartographer Kenneth Dumas, who's been involved with T map development for the last 32 years, confirms as much based on his discussions with the C7A designers who worked on the original 1965 map (found on RUclips, can't include the link). And a further historical correction, the former name was Orange Street, not Way.
David -
Thanks so much for your feedback. In researching this story, we came across conflicting information from various sources. As you point out, the history section of the T website states that only the Blue and Red lines were based on the given reasons. Yet the MBTA contradicted itself in a TikTok video from this year which forwards both the Green line/Emerald necklace reasoning and the Orange line/Orange Street explanation as well as the Red and Blue line reasoning. The “all four lines have a reason” explanation can also be found in many other places, from personal blogs to Boston Magazine. In a 2018 interview with Bloomberg, Peter Chermayeff from C7A, who was on the project, stated that the Red, Blue and Green lines were chosen for those specific reasons, but the Orange was not. Ultimately, I reached out to C7A asking if they could definitively confirm which - if any - of these versions (Just the red and blue; red, blue and green; or all four) was true. Their response was that the Red, Blue, and Green lines were chosen for the stated reasons, but that the orange line, which was initially slated to be the yellow line, was selected and assigned randomly. Our aim is to get it right, so I will keep at this - and we’ll update this piece if needed. I’d appreciate it if you could email me the RUclips link you mentioned at curiositydesk@wgbh.org. And I will try and get in touch with Ken Dumas. Regarding Orange Street, thanks for putting us straight. We’ve issued a correction here and on the video.
Thanks again -
Edgar
This is fascinating. I love the color system.