Subway Ripple
Thesis Faculty:
Jesse HardingSubway Ripple is an interactive documentary about the New York subway. It's built around one specific morning in 2019, when a signal failure stopped the 4, 5, and 6 trains during rush hour. You follow two real commuters and watch what a broken line does to their day.
Subway Ripple is a web-based interactive piece about the New York subway and the people who quietly depend on it. It’s anchored to one morning, August 13, 2019, when a signal failure shut down the Lexington Avenue trunk during rush hour. You’re asked to break a subway line and see what that does to two specific people. Maya is a nineteen-year-old CUNY scholarship student trying to make an 8:30 exam. Claire is a night-shift home-care aide on her way to relieve another aide at 11pm. The point is simple. When the subway fails, the cost isn’t shared evenly. It falls hardest on the people who can’t absorb it.
The right edge of the screen carries what the project calls the Reality Panel. The moment you take a subway line offline in the simulation, the panel slides in and breaks the fourth wall. The top half pulls live service alerts from the MTA’s own status feed, so whatever is happening on that line right now in the real world appears on the same screen as whatever you just simulated. The bottom half is a curated archive. Past disruptions on that specific line are surfaced as small cards with a date, a one-sentence summary, the number of riders affected, and a citation. Every claim has a source. The whole point of the panel is to refuse the implication that the morning you just played through is hypothetical.
For website experience please visit: https://subway-ripple-sim.vercel.app/
