LA Metro opened the first operating segment of the K Line today, and there’s a new map to go along with it! As we haven’t reviewed this map since 2016 (when the Expo Line extension to Santa Monica opened!), it’s high time for a new look.
The first thing I noticed is how this version of the map seems to be a point-by-point correction of the perceived flaws that I noted in that 2016: the Los Angeles River has been removed from the map, the loop of the A/Blue Line in Long Beach has been restored to a more accurate orientation, and the labels along the B/Red Line are spaced out a bit more evenly, though I think this can still be better – I feel that it can sometimes be better to space labels evenly along a line instead of the station dots. All of these changes are definite improvements, so I’m happy to see them made.
The gradual transition from named lines (Blue/Red/Expo, etc.) to lettered lines – A Line, B Line, E Line, etc.) continues with bullets now at the ends of route lines on the map, but with both names still noted in the legend. By the time the Regional Connector comes on line, I would expect that lettered line names will stand on their own.
The new K Line (note that there’s no secondary name – e.g., the “Pink Line” – for it) slots into the map nicely, with plenty of room for the future stations to be added between Westchester/Veterans and Aviation/LAX stations. I’d personally like to see a thin “bus” line drawn from Aviation/LAX station to the airport to give a better indication of the LAX Shuttle service instead of the fairly indistinct icon that’s currently used.
There are a couple of minor technical errors and inconsistencies: all the labels on the western end of the C Line from Mariposa to Redondo Beach have been pushed downwards slightly so that they no longer align to the same grid as the A and J lines. This is probably intentional to give a bit more room around LAX, but I do like it when elements intentionally line up across a map like this. The label for Crenshaw station sits considerably higher above the C Line than all the other labels.
Very minor pet peeves: Why is 7th St/Metro Center abbreviated to “Metro Ctr” when there’s plenty of room to spell out the name in full? Similarly, the abbreviation of “Arts District” to “Arts Dist”. For me, abbreviations like this on a transit map should be kept to an absolute minimum and used only if there is no other option.
Our final word: A sleek upgrade to what was already one of the better US transit maps. Looking good, LA Metro!
Hello! I’m a transportation planning student and longtime fan of your blog, and wanted to submit this map from the twin cities of Zlín and Otrokovice in Moravia in the Czech Republic. The cities have a long history as company towns for the Baťa shoe company and have a very different pattern of urban development than other cities in the region. The region, set in a valley, was planned reflecting modernist principles set by Le Corbusier and Ebenezer Howard, with later additions following the typical socialist-influenced planning used in other modernist housing estates in the former Czechoslovakia. The city’s trolleybus network, which began construction right before WWII, follows the main urban growth axis along the valley, and a local railway line is also integrated into the municipal transport ticketing scheme. The map used is an isometric one which uses coloration based on the tariff zones lines pass through, and line thickness determines the mode that operates on that portion. Let me know your thoughts!
Transit Maps says:
This is a bit of an odd one. While this diagram has been drawn with a lot of skill and precision, I don’t think it’s actually that usable as a piece of wayfinding design. The best example of this genre – an isometric diagram of S- and U-Bahn service in Stuttgart from c. 2000 – works because the whole thing is so simple and clean. All the routes are shown at the same level in the hierarchy and are traceable from one end to the other along their colour-coded lines, leaving no ambiguity at all.
However, this diagram is far more complex and idiosyncratic, and the isometric treatment just adds another barrier to comprehension on top of that. This means everything just takes that little bit longer to understand, and the oft-quoted “eight-second rule” (before a user simply gives up) starts to kick in. A few main problems that I see:
The colour-coding of lines by fare zone seems like a good idea, but it breaks the routes up into disparate segments that look for all the world like they’re totally separate routes that interchange at certain stations along the way. Meanwhile, the grey and white shading behind the diagram has absolutely nothing to do with fare zones, but apparently denotes areas where front door-only boarding is enforced (presumably to stop unscrupulous riders from sneaking on via the back door and not paying a fare?). So right from the start, that’s two major design elements that have completely different meanings to what they usually have on a transit map. While innovation and thinking outside the box are laudable ideals, too much messing with the recognised design language of transit maps can impede usability.
Because each mode – trolleybus and bus – only gets one route line regardless of how many services use each segment, users have to find their desired route number and then hunt for it across the map again and again to follow it to their destination. Changes of direction and branches aren’t shown that intuitively, so it’s hard work, made a bit more difficult by the fact that there’s no differentiation in the way that the route numbers are presented visually – it becomes tricky to know whether you should be following a thick trolleybus line or a thin bus line. Of course, locals might be aware that trolleybuses use route numbers 1 through 14 (the rest being normal buses), but that doesn’t help tourists or other people unfamiliar with the network.
The diagram certainly is visually striking, and I appreciate the attention to detail that’s been put into its creation. Like the Stuttgart diagram, there’s a “3D” building incorporated into the diagram that helps to really sell the dimensional illusion. I also really appreciate the way that there are absolutely no horizontal or vertical route line segments – these always look a bit out of place on these isometric projections. The legend is skillfully incorporated into the map, and the arrows to orient users along the length of the valley is also a nice touch.
Our final word: Really, really pretty – but it seems like a lot of hard work to actually use to get around. Too many conventions get turned on their head.
Thanks to everyone on Twitter alerting me to this new map! While there’s a lot of Washington, DC content on the blog, I haven’t fully reviewed the official WMATA map since 2013, so this revision seems like a good time to look at again.
First off – let’s set it out of our system, everyone… SILVER LINE! SILVER LINE! Finally extending all the way out to Dulles Airport and Ashburn, and surely opening any time now, right? As is usual for WMATA, the map uses the longest name possible for the airport station: “Washington Dulles International Airport” – while the airport’s official name – is an absolute mouthful. Here in Portland, the TriMet MAX map just says “Portland Airport”, not “Portland International Airport” and everyone still knows exactly what they mean.
There’s plenty of other new names apart from those on the Silver Line extension, with five stations getting new names: Downtown Largo (from Largo Town Center), Hyattsville Crossing (Prince George’s Plaza), North Bethesda (White Flint), West Falls Church-VT (removing UVA from the secondary name), and Tysons (Tysons Corner). The future in-fill station at Potomac Yard also makes an appearance with a hollow white dot for its station marker. Apparently, this will be a sticker placed on top of the final version of the map at Metro stations – a clever way to prevent having to replace maps again when the station actually opens.
Once the Silver Line extension opens, the 5A bus service to Dulles Airport will cease, and the map reflects this by removing the connection icons at Rosslyn and L’Enfant Plaza. The B30 to BWI no longer runs, so that’s the end of bus representation on the Metro map.
Stylistically, nothing much has changed now for many years – this is still very recognisably and unmistakably a WMATA map. However, there’s some inconsistencies and room for improvement in places. First off, WMATA really has to work out how they’re going to treat subtitles for station names consistently. We have “Virginia Sq–GMU” and “Ballston–MU” (among others) on one line, but “West Falls Church–VT” and “Potomac Yard–VT” get their secondary names placed in the subtitle. Why? It mainly looks like it’s because the station dots for Virginia Square and Ballston are placed too close together to allow for subtitles, but it just creates inconsistency in the design. Personally, I’d vote for having all of these two- or three-letter abbreviations moved up to the main title, saving the subtitles for the longer station names that need that space saved.
The DC Metro map has always been visually busy, with lots of background colours and detail leading to some poor label placement (look at U Street and other stations on the Yellow/Green line just laid down right on top of the route lines), but that doesn’t mean that new elements need to make things worse. Look at the way that all the new Silver Line station labels overlap the Potomac River, when there’s absolutely no need for them to do so. We don’t need to see the twists and turns of a river on a simplified diagram like this, and it’s not even a particularly accurate interpretation of the geography anyway. If the river just extended straight out from the District border at a 45-degree angle, it would avoid all of the labels completely and dramatically improve legibility.
And one tiny little technical error I spotted: the Fairfax/Arlington county border encroaches into the white keyline where the Silver Line crosses over the Orange Line: all other borders respect such keylines.
Our final word: An obvious evolution of previous versions – there are no surprises here! – that continues and perhaps compounds some previous flaws. But… SILVER LINE! SILVER LINE!
Visit the Transit Maps print store for a wide selection of original map designs and lovingly restored reproductions of vintage maps.
Over on Twitter, Peter Lloyd – the doyen of new York Subway experts – has been showcasing the many maps of Arthur Weindorf (1885–1979), a perhaps unsung contributor to the rich transit mapping history of that city. Weindorf was something of an artistic Renaissance Man – he was a cartoonist, fine art painter, and architectural engineer for the New York Public Service Commission. As well as his many drawings and maps of the subway, he created three-dimensional models of the system that were displayed at the 1939–1940 World’s Fair.
Of all the maps that Peter has posted, this hand-drawn preliminary version of an ultimately unpublished IND Division map really caught may eye. It’s simplified, diagrammatic and surprisingly elegant in its execution, with colour-coded lines to bundle like routes together and a clear visual distinction between express (solid lines) and local/shuttle (pecked lines) services.
One oddity of the system as shown is the short-lived Court Street station in Brooklyn, now better known as the home of the New York Transit Museum. Opened in 1936 with plans to be the northern terminus of the HH Fulton Street Local and with possible future extension into Manhattan, it closed just ten years later with service only ever being provided by a one-stop shuttle to the nearby Hoyt-Schermerhorn station.
Despite being drawn two years after the unification of the three divisions of the subway, the map still only shows IND lines, with the few free transfers to the BMT and IRT indicated by large callouts. From 1943, the New York Board of Transportation started using Hagstrom maps that showed the entire network, which might explain why this map was never actually published – the last remnant of the “old way” of depicting the subway.
The NJ Transit rail map has basically looked the same – and has retained most of its faults – since I reviewed it back in the very early days of the blog [November 2011, 1.5 stars], so it came as a surprise when I discovered that that diagram has been replaced with a new geographical map this month. NJ Transit has been down this path before, with similar maps used around 20 years ago, though this design is considerably cleaner than that very muddy execution.
One of the main problems with the previous diagram is that it simultaneously had to show a sprawling statewide network as well as local services like PATH, and the Hudson-Bergen light rail. Obviously, these are at very different levels of scale and detail, and the diagram struggled because of it, unsatisfactorily compressing the considerable detail around Newark/New York into a very small part of the diagram.
The solution chosen here – a statewide geographical map supplemented with local area insets where needed – isn’t groundbreaking, but it is effective and a massive improvement. The cleverest part is the way the bottom third of the map gets rotated 45 degrees counter-clockwise to save massive amounts of space: the Atlantic City Line runs neatly across the bottom of the map instead of having to drop towards the southeast. The map’s border does a lot of good work here, clearly separating the two parts of the map, while making it clear that there’s continuity between the sections at Bordentown.
The diagrammatic insets are neatly drawn with a minimum of fuss, though the colours used for some of the light rail lines could perhaps be better differentiated: it’s a little hard to tell PATH’s grey apart from the dull brown of the Hudson-Bergen light rail, for example. I also like it when the background colours used in an inset are subtly different to those used on the main map, just to help set them above and apart. A leading line or arrow linking the insets to the part of the main map that they’re magnifying would also be handy.
Our final word: One of those rare occasions where a geographical rail map is superior to a diagram. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
My apologies for the glare in the photo [No problem! I also straightened the image for publication – Cam]. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this 1982 Montreal Metro map. I found it in a preserved MR-63 subway car at Exporail, a railway museum outside Montreal. The map shows the three Metro lines open at the time with white stations, as well as the under-construction Blue Line and Du Collège extension of the Orange Line.
While the font may not win any awards for legibility, I think it fits beautifully with the map’s design aesthetic. There are a few station names that have changed since 1982 — I find the change from Vincent-d’Indy to the current Édouard-Montpetit particularly interesting. Lastly, I’m sure the makers of this map could never have imagined that the “Métro régional projeté” (given only a small mention in the legend) would be realized before the Blue Line to Anjou.
Transit Maps says:
What a fantastically chunky iteration of the Montreal Metro map! Everything is thick and oversized, and it’s just wonderful. The crowning glory is the use of ITC Bauhaus Black as the typeface throughout: it really shouldn’t work at all, and yet it somehow contrasts against and softens the blockiness of the map to balance it out nicely. Legibility is reduced slightly where the white text crosses the yellow Line 4, but it only affects a few stations.
Other nice touches are the line number bullets at the termini of each line: a square that continues in the direction of the line, but rotates the line number to remain horizontal; and the use of black station dots to denote planned future stations. The fact that Line 5 is only in its planning stage at this point in time helps to explain some of the station name changes: Vincent-d’Indy was an early placeholder name, but the station opened as Édouard-Montpetit in 1988.
Later versions of the map, like this one from 2012, made the waterways more geographical in mature, but I think the level of stylization on this version matches the chunky, diagrammatic nature of the route lines much better. It’s interesting to see how many of the elements that make the Montreal map unique – the black background and the rotated rectilinear form especially – have remained constant, which helps maintain a consistency in design language (crazy display typefaces not withstanding!) over the years.
Our final word: Chunky, bold and with a crazy font choice that somehow works: this is just great, and such a product of its time.
An attractive bird’s-eye panoramic map of the lines of the Peninsular Railway (1900–1934), affectionately known as “the Pin” by locals. The railway was founded as a subsidiary of the Southern Pacific Railroad to provide connecting electric interurban service through the Santa Clara Valley from San Jose.
The map itself is a fairly typical example of the genre, though the curved labels for locality names along the lines are an unusual and effective device for enclosing the area relative to the rail line.
It’s been a few years since the last time you checked out what was happening in Santiago de Chile [I last reviewed the official map in 2017 – Cam]. Well, times haven’t been too kind to us down here, but I don’t want to go into details about our current and future “troubles”. They’re too complicated, so anyways…
For me, the resemblance of this new official map to Laura’s diagram is only superficial: really only apparent because the official map has become more diagrammatic, losing the busy street grid that used to be such a feature. This is not nearly as schematic as Laura’s diagram, with lots of pseudo-geographical changes in direction still apparent. Though the form of the map has changed, it still uses a lot of the same design language as the 2017 map – note the distinctive terminus station markers – which is nice to see from a continuity point of view.
I do feel that the top part of the map seems a little cramped in comparison with the bottom half… some more care with the vertical spacing of stations from top to bottom using a grid could have helped here.
Very strangely, the map layers the river on top of the lines that cross it. While this is technically correct (the lines run in tunnels under the river), it’s simply not an important or useful piece of information and makes the route lines look disjointed and discontinuous.
Speaking of the river itself, while I appreciate the effort, I don’t think that the wave pattern texture used is particularly effective or aesthetically pleasing. A little more craftsmanship here might have resulted in something a bit better.
Our final word: A shift to a more diagrammatic representation of a growing network results in something that’s perhaps just slightly better than what came before it.
A very handsome map of transportation services in the greater Kansas City area from 1941. A nicely subdued olive street grid is overlaid by the route lines – colour-coded by mode (black for streetcars, blue and red for bus lines, and a lovely aqua for trolleybuses). Areas of interest are called out in bright yellow, so this looks like a six-colour print job – quite a luxury in 1941!
There’s also a great downtown inset, a great ornate compass rose incorporating the logo of the Kansas City Public Service Co., and some fantastic 1940s typography throughout. What’s not to love?
Side note: Copy on the reverse of the map notes that the transportation company of 1941 “operates a fleet of 413 electric cars, 234 motor busses and 86 trolley busses, supplying service on 251 miles of street car routes, 191 miles of motor bus routes and 51 miles of trolley bus routes.”
I would like to share with you the new Metrovalencia’s network map, whose design has been updated with the opening of the new Line 10 this year. The main reason why the transit operator decided to redesign it from scratch instead of just adding the new line layout is because they wanted to start avoiding using diagonal-axis labels on it, as they think horizontal labels are more accessible for people with intellectual disability.
But there are more differences:
Tram services now are represented again with solid lines, as it was in the previous map before the 2015’s redesign, ending with the differentiation from the “metro” ones. This could be because the new Line 10 is such a mix, operated with tramway units but with underground stations in the city center. But maybe this rule could have been maintained using the two-toned line for the street-runing sections and the solid line style for traffic segregated sections, for example.
They’ve included some spatial references, such as the curves of the subway tunnel between Àngel Guimerà and Xàtiva or Ayora and Marítim, or the Pont de Fusta loop, which before they were in a straight line.
As almost all the city center stations are shared by different lines, now all of them are officially transfer stations. The map also points when in the same station different lines stop in different platforms (e.g. Alameda). The old transfer icon now represents intermodal stations where the users can change from subway to tramway lines or vice versa (except in Bailén/Alacant, maybe because they consider they’re different stations?).
It’s drawn the future underground moving walkway which will be built to connect Xàtiva and Alacant stations as the project to extend the line some meters more with a new station for Line 10 built in Xàtiva was cancelled. Now, this connection just can be done walking on the street as the woman icon pretends to explain.
In this new map version, it’s represented the stations where some routes can end when they run as partial routes, with the line icon near its label.
The transit operator decided to reduce the number of fare zones from 4 to just 2 (plus the Airport fare zone), so now there are some stations that belong to both zones represented by this background color overlap.
A similar design has been created also for the TRAM of Alicante, which is run by the same transit operator, so now both cities shares the same map style (but with different typeface: Titillium for Metrovalencia and Rotis for TRAM).
I would appreciate if you could check this version and tell us your opinion about if all these changes and new additions have been really an improvement or just unnecessary with the previous map design [from 2015; review here – Cam] as a reference.
Transit Maps says:
There’s some things I really like about this diagram and there are others I’m not so fond of… so let’s start with the good!
Metrovalencia is a bit of an odd system in that it freely combines street-running trams, a full metro including subways, and commuter rail that runs far out into the surrounding countryside, all under one umbrella. So I really don’t mind that there’s no attempt made at mode differentiation here – these lines are all part of Metrovalencia, and are all treated equally. What I really do like is that the central Zone A is presented with a good degree of spatial accuracy, and the map then gets progressively more diagrammatic the further out it gets. This condenses those far-flung lines (especially Line 1 to the south) rather wonderfully. Presumably, the way that stops are grouped along those lines reflects the different built-up urban areas along each route – though it does perhaps just end up looking a bit haphazard. I’d be interested in seeing an alternative where the stops are always evenly spaced: it might just look a little more harmonious.
The overlapping zones are drawn about as neatly as they can be, though I do think they could be a bit lighter in tone. As it stands, it seems like some of the route colours have had to be strengthened quite a lot to compete with the background – Line 1 is more of a dull gold than its previous goldenrod yellow, for example. It’s also unfortunate that the dark gold outline for Zone A passes right through the middle of the map’s legend!
The new interchange markers are definitely an improvement over the previous version, clearly indicating when passenger movement between platforms or modes is required. The weakest interchange design is at Empalme, where Line 1 takes a 90-degree turn underneath the marker, which is generally regarded as bad design practice.
Finally, it’s interesting to note that this diagram takes the approach of using a crossed-out wheelchair icon to indicate the one and only non-accessible station at Valencia Sud, which is fair enough.
Our final word: A definite improvement in my eyes, though still not truly outstanding. By my reckoning, this is at least the third totally different design for the Metrovalencia diagram since 2009 (when I visited the city and rode the network), which is fairly rapid turnover and doesn’t really speak to a consistent design language for the network.
