Month: March 2013

Unofficial Map: Portland MAX Light Rail – Super Mario 3 Style

March 29, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Mash-Up Maps, Popular Culture, Unofficial Maps
Tags:

Here’s the latest “Mario Map” from the incredibly prolific Dave Delisle (seriously, how much cool stuff can one guy pump out?). This one is of my home town of Portland, Oregon, and Dave actually enlisted my help in checking the accuracy of the route layouts and the spelling of the station names. Considering the ridiculous length of some of the station names in the system and the limitations of the 8-bit art style, Dave’s done […]

Photo: Shinjuku

March 28, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Miscellany
Tags:

A lovely little slice of Tokyo life, complete with a very compact but informative strip map for the Yamanote Line: current station, connecting services (both in two languages), and estimated time to other stations on the line. It’s basically the analogue version of the digital map that’s on the trains themselves, as seen in this post. Source: tokyoform/Flickr

Photo – Official Map: Opolskie Voivodeship Railway Network, Poland

March 27, 2013
comment 1
Filed Under:
Official Maps
Tags:

The whole map is a bit of a mess, with all sorts of random angles everywhere (both route lines and station labels), but what really takes this map into the land of the bizarre are the big photos of trains superimposed over it. It’s like someone said, “Hey, there’s a bit of white space left over – what can we fill it up with? I know! How about some shots of our trains, and we’ll rotate […]

Q&A with Spanish Design Magazine/Blog “Yorokobu”

March 26, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Questions
Tags:

For those of who you missed it, Transit Maps did a quick little Q&A over the weekend with the amazing Spanish design magazine and blog, Yorokobu. (Seriously, go take a look, even if you don’t speak Spanish. Totally inspiring!) Anyway, for those of you that don’t speak Spanish (like me) and can’t/won’t use a web translation service, here’s my original answers to their questions in English. It may differ slightly to what was published because […]

All Aboard the Orient Express!

March 25, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Unofficial Maps
Tags:

Here’s an absolutely charming little map found on the inside of a French model train set box lid. I don’t have a definitive date for this, but it does have a lovely retro feel to it. The map itself isn’t much help, as it’s pretty much a work of fiction: a weird combination of different parts of the Orient Express’s historical routes (see this diagram on Wikipedia) and a branch to Warsaw via Prague that […]

Submission – Fantasy Map: Louisville, Kentucky Light Rail Map by Peter Dovak

March 25, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Fantasy Maps
Tags:

Submitted by Peter, who says: Hello!  I’m very much new to Illustrator, but I have a love of transit and a budding love of graphic design, and reading your wonderful blog has inspired me to try and pick it up.  For practice, I tried turning one of my childhood daydreams into reality — a hypothetical map for a light rail system for my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky.  Louisville is a notoriously anti-transit town with just […]

Official Map: Interactive Metro Map, Pyongyang, North Korea

March 21, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Official Maps
Tags:

An interactive metro map from North Korea’s secretive capital. The green buttons across the bottom of the map represent all the stations: press one and the path from your current station to your destination lights up. With just a handful of stations on two lines (and only one interchange), I hardly think many people are going to be overwhelmed by the system’s complexity. Wikipedia’s article on the Pyongyang Metro is actually a very interesting read: the […]

Historical Map: Preferred Rapid Transit Scheme, Toronto, 1910

March 20, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Historical Maps
Tags:

A rather lovely (and somewhat prescient) figure from a report prepared by the New York engineering firm of Jacobs & Davies for the City of Toronto in 1910. It shows plans for a system of “subway streetcars” – a combination of at-grade and subterranean routes – both ahead of its time and prohibitively expensive, especially for a modest city like Toronto at the time (which had a population of just 350,000).  Source: levyrapidtransit.ca via @bgilliard

Big Project – Work In Progress Screen Shot

March 20, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
My Transit Maps
Tags:

Some people have asked how I’m going on my new big project – a simplified map of all U.S. Highways and Interstates on the one map. Well, here’s where I’m at currently. Everything in the western half of the map is pretty much finished: the east coast needs to be revisited for consistency and there’s still a whole heap of work to do in the south east. I actually feel that I’ve left the hardest […]