John Rowland:
I have a 1970s New York Subway map which is Beck-like.

That map is sort of Beck-like, but it uses a different stripe for
each route, and the route variations are rather more complex than in
London. Imagine London's triple line for Circle / H&C / Metropolitan
turned into six, with a separate coloured stripe for each branch of
the Met, and you'll get the idea. (Since many routes have express
and local trains, station stops were shown on each individual route
as dots within the colour stripe.)

I always liked it, but many people found it, shall we say, more
successful as abstract art than as a route map, and so the current
design was introduced to replace it.
--
Mark Brader | "Oh, sure, you can make anything sound sleazy if you,
Toronto | you know, tell it exactly the way it happened."
| -- Bruce Rasmussen: "Anything But Love"

My text in this article is in the public domain.