Submitted by Anthony, who says:
You reviewed my map of the Long Island Rail Road a few years ago. Your critiques and your blog have helped me in pushing forward on my current project, a unified Subway and Bus Map,
I’m calling it the Bullet Map, named after the nickname for the circle subway route indicators. I launched it a month ago with a Medium post explaining methodology. What do you think of it?
Transit Maps says:
Anthony’s actually been keeping me appraised of this massive and complex project for a while now – long enough to know that all routes on the map were once shades of grey as shown in the third image above. While this gave a nice light background for station labels and the eponymous bullets to sit on, I felt that it made for a very monochrome map without any element really tying the whole piece together into a unified whole.
So I’m glad that Anthony bit the bullet (pun fully intended) and added some much-needed visual “oomph” to the map by reinstating the proper colours for the subway lines (and the Select Bus Service). For me, the Subway is – and always will be – the transit heartbeat of the city, so it fully deserves its place at the top of the information hierarchy. It certainly differentiates the service types a lot better than greys just a few percentage points of black ink apart, and makes route tracing a lot easier! The scope of the map has also expanded a bit, as this new version shows transit west of the Hudson in the form of PATH and the Hudson-Bergen light rail line.
As far as layout goes, I think Anthony’s done a great job of showing the dense networks clearly while still retaining a sense of accuracy with the layout of the city. The map uses angles in increments of 22.5 degrees, which gives good flexibility in handling the different (and sometimes intersecting) street grids of the boroughs. The labelling is neat and consistently applied, as is the nomenclature, which is always a good indication of attention to detail in my eyes.
Impressively, the map works equally well when one of the transit layers is removed – say, the regular buses, leaving just the SBS and Subway as “rapid” services. Indeed, as part of his Kickstarter campaign, Anthony is working on a smartphone app of the map which allows the user to do that just that with the map as well as scroll around and zoom in. There are also different print versions of the map: a smaller 24×26″ rapid transit map, and a large 36×48″ map of the whole unified bullet map, as well as a host of other rewards. Wisely, Anthony is also offering “borough maps” that show selected portions of the whole map for those parochial types. There’s only ten days left to go in the Kickstarter campaign, and funding hasn’t quite been reached yet, so I’d urge you to go and take a look if you’d like one of these maps in your hands.