A few weeks ago, The Atlantic Cities posted about a Baltimore resident who had wondered about what kind of PT system would exist if every Subway Sandwich store was an actual subway station.
There are upwards of 140 Subway sandwich shops in the Baltimore metropolitan region, which is a whole lot more than there are actual subway transit stops (which, as you may recall from that early Subway wallpaper, provided the original inspiration for the franchise). Baltimore today has just one partially underground subway line running from Owings Mills to the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Otherwise, the city primarily gets around by car, bus and light rail.
You can image, though, how the ubiquitous sandwich shop might get a transit enthusiast thinking. And so we bring you, thanks to Baltimore resident Chris Nelson, this dream map of a subway system for the region if all its Subway restaurants were actual transit stops:
This is what he came up with for Baltimore:
A reader sent me his own version of this for Auckland but unfortunately I can’t find it any more so I decided to create my own version. First step was to map out every Subway Store in the region. It was easy enough as they are all listed on their website but it was a little time consuming due to there being 92 of them in Auckland. This gave me a map that looked like this: (there are a few out of this picture)
It was then time for the tricky parts of to try adding some routes. I tried to focus on not having every route go through the CBD to create a bit of a deformed grid across the city. There were definitely a few stores that seemed hard to serve.
Of course this is only really just for a bit of fun and not exactly realistic. Even so I’m interested to see what you guys can come up with, as such here is the Google Earth file with all of the Subway stores. Upload an image and link to it in the comments or send it to me and we will see which are the best ones.
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I remember when I was younger seeing the Subway sign at the Caltex along Mt Wellington Hwy where Sylvia Park is now (I guess it was one of the first in Auckland maybe? At least it was the first I noticed). I used to think it actually was a subway station and used to always wonder where is went and why it was located in such an odd spot. They should have made some sort of hint it was a sandwich shop haha
92 of these damn stores! Awful news.
Hey, it could be a lot worse – they could be KFC or McDs. At least Subway’s food is fairly intrinsically healthy (within a range according to fillings selected, of course)
The slightly ironic thing is that Subway stores tend to locate in town centers, shopping malls, employment locations and along busy main roads. They’re almost exclusively where there is lots of foot traffic and plenty of residences and job locations nearby, or lots of vehicle traffic going past.
So they are actually pretty good places to have transit stations! Overlay the new FTN and I wouldn’t be surprised if 95% of the stores were on it.
You could probably design a worse network than the above, but we’ll leave that to AT.
Imagine if you mapped this out with McDonalds? If only all the regular “diners” of these fast food joints took public transport, cycled or even…..walked. What a healthier city we would be! Less fatties due to over eating bad food!
Wellington’s network would plainly horrible if the Subway stores were subway stations.
In summary, you would have:
Otaki – Waikanae – Paraparaumu – Mana – Porirua -Tawa – Johnsonville – Mulgrave Street
Masterton – Rimutaka – Upper Hutt – Silverstream – Queensgate – High Street – Petone – Mulgrave Street
Karori – Mulgrave Street – The Terrace – Lambton Quay – Featherston Street – Cable Car – Willis Street – Manners Street – Dixon Street – Courtenay Place
Manners Street – Vivian Street – Basin Reserve – Kilbirnie – Miramar
Kilbirnie – Airport
I wonder if AT could persuade the Subway frachise to significantly contribute to funding a proposed passenger such as this network if they agreed to put a railway station at each Subway restaurant! A sort of unique PPP arraingement?
We’re off to a good start, since there’s already a Subway at Auckland’s only actual subway station – Britomart.