Everyone has an idea to improve the subway riding experience. Designer and self-described “innovation strategist” Randall Gregory has 100.
Gregory, a 29-year-old Sunnyside resident and Phoenix, Ariz., native, started a blog on Tumblr called 100 Ideas for New York Subway that imagines what the subway could be, if things like budgets and politics were of no importance.
“I looked at something that would happen in the subway, for example, people swiping their cards wrong, and then I would either think about, through my own knowledge of how that can can be improved or looking at the rest of the world, and see if someone solved the problem,” he said.
Every day I would look at something else that was happening in the subway and develop a problem,” Gregory said.
He would take that problem, pair it with an image and a possible solution to his site, which was born from a master’s project for a branding program at the School of Visual Arts.
Some ideas are obvious to courteous riders (keep feet off train car seats), while others would make the subway more user friendly (painting some stations with the colors of a train line), safer (security cameras in cars), and cleaner (HEPA air filters and hand sanitizers).
“The MTA is always open to innovative ideas, and we’ll look at these proposals, with an eye toward those that could be implemented at low cost and without taking away from other high-priority efforts,” said MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz.
Gregory plans to expand his project to solve the little problems of urban living.
“This project is [about] how we interact with the environment of New York and what can be better about that interaction,” he said.
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