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Alterna-T: The public-transit logos that weren't
By adamg on Mon, 02/19/2018 - 9:32am
Our ubiquitous simple circled T didn't spring from the depths of a tunnel fully formed like some Venus on a half shell. It turns out that Cambridge Seven Associates considered a number of potential logos for the MBTA, created in 1964 to take over from the old MTA.
MBTA History Train has been posting photos of the rejects, thanks to the work of Jake Foley at the Seashore Trolley Museum, who found them buried in some old paperwork the museum has.
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Comments
TLF logo?
TLF logo?
The Circle T
The middle one gets my vote it would remind passengers they are about to enter the Twilight zone and their trip will encounter unexpected twists and turns.
Wouldn't have been possible in '64, but ...
Today, you could probably replace the current logo everywhere with some flat screens showing that middle logo with the circles moving - which the T could use to put riders to sleep as they sit in a train that isn't moving.
The left one looks like it would work well in Gotham City, the right looks like it would make sense if the T ever expanded to Vulcan.
Engineering society
The one on the right looks like it was designed for an engineering society.
The one on the right looks
The one on the right looks like it was designed by an engineering society.
Totally
It is a dimension as vast as metro Boston and as reliable as a Dodge Omni. It is the middle ground between dependable and useless, between underfunded and inefficient, and it lies between the pit of a commuter's fears and the hope of an on time arrival. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the MBTA Zone.
The first one is clearly the logo of a transportation system designed and managed by Red Skull.
Hindsight being what it is...
Amazing how timeless some of the designs turned out to be, and how dated others look.
FL"T"
Definitely some freemasonry reference right there
The MBTA bar
The Bacardi one would've been appropriate since T cops pretty much ignore drinking on the red and green lines.
Ⓣ
On that site's Twitter picture of Park Street:
Are those lockers next to the pay phones on the left side, and were they for (paying) public use? The picture looks like it was taken sometime in the mid-70's (based off the "Boston 200" logo on the waiting trolley) and I don't recall seeing them there when I first took a trolley northbound in about 1979.
That's something you'd never see around here again.
Pay lockers?
Whole bunch of them outside the Allston Stop & Shop and the N. Harvard/Western 7-11.
Unless you mean specifically at a T station, not a private business.
Pay Lockers
At one time mid 60's to early 70's , one could find pay lockers in several ares of the city. There were lockers in the old bus terminal in Park Sq, South Station, etc. Filene's Basement had them to store your purchases so you could continue to shop for more bargains.
Every train station of
Every train station of significant size in Europe has luggage lockers.
It's like they thought about the needs of people travelling by mass transit, and made an effort to meet those needs.
Lockers
All train and bus stations in the US had them. They were great if you were taking a day trip somewhere and didn't want to shlep everything with you. I don't remember now if you could pay for several days in a row or if you had to put more coins in every 24 hours. If the lockers couldn't handle longer periods, you could check things with a live person in a storage area. The lockers used quarters, so it was nice and cheap. This all ended sometime in the '70s when some evil characters figured out lockers were a perfect spot to plant bombs. Lockers disappeared quickly after that. One more way in which our lives were made less convenient by a few sick minds.
One more way in which our
One more way in which our lives were made less convenient by a massive paranoid overreaction to a few sick minds.
Paranoia, public lockers, etc.
While I agree that there are undoubtedly many paranoid overreactions to isolated events, it's pretty hard to monitor what's in a locker, especially when it's in a busy public transportation center. it would have been easy in a space like that to have the type of destruction we saw in the Boston Marathon bombings. I liked the convenience of those lockers, but I think the decision to remove them was probably the right one.
yup
I LOVED lockers at bus stations. Esp when I was moving to Boston.
I could party all weekend at a bud's here, change into my suit for job interviews mondays, dump my luggage in a locker at South Station and be on foot all day.
I wish they would bring them back, so handy. But you know, because of 9/11, they are now a thing of past like automats.
Straw Man Proposals
They illustrate things we should dislike in one idea to help us see what we should like in another.
Tesla, Hypnotoad, ST:TNG
.
Almost like
Which is almost like:
Quick, Robin
to the Bat-Taxi. This train isn't moving.
Time to pull the Bat-Fare Cards
from our utility belts. Confound it - the faregates are jammed!!
T
We were living in Sweden at the time and a group from the MTA were visiting Stockholm checking out other transportation systems.
We had dinner with them one night and they told us that they had decided that they were going to use the same logo that Sweden used the letter T.
T
We were living in Sweden at the time and a group from the MTA were visiting Stockholm checking out other transportation systems.
We had dinner with them one night and they told us that they had decided that they were going to use the same logo that Sweden used the letter T.