Do Know of a Version of the New York Subway Map Done in a Tube Map Style?

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Somewhat surprisingly, no. 

I thought perhaps that Maxwell Roberts had done one at some stage, but he’s actually done the reverse: the Tube Map in the style of the Vignelli New York subway map

As you can see, he’s carried across the New York style of showing all the service patterns on the map. In New York, this is used to distinguish between local and express services, while in London, it reveals the secret inner workings of the lines that the Tube Map never really gets around to showing. For example, Metropolitan line services out to Rickmansworth and beyond don’t stop between Harrow-on-the-Hill and Moor Park.

It’s just a fact of life in London: service patterns are indicated on the platform with signs and announcements, rather than on the map. I well remember standing on the westbound District Line platforms at Earl’s Court back in 2003, watching for the arrow on the indicator board to point towards Wimbledon so I could get back to where I was staying in London at the time.

Unfortunately, if you took the Tube Map’s design principles – show the line, but not the service patterns – and applied it to New York, you’d come up with a map that everyone would decry as useless because it doesn’t show express versus local. This is probably why such a map doesn’t seem to exist. 

I guess you could add extra route lines to get around this problem, but then it wouldn’t truly be in the style of the Tube Map, would it?

Edit: You can buy prints of my attempt at such a map here.

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