Month: September 2013

Official Map: Gauteng Metrorail, South Africa, 2013

September 30, 2013
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Submitted by scsj, who says: Metrorail in Gauteng (Johannesburg/Pretoria/Soweto/Germiston), South Africa. I don’t know, I find this map monumentally confusing. There are way too many colors and none of the lines have names, there’s no scale or anything to indicate location other than station names, it’s so cramped, and it sacrifices too much geographic accuracy for the sake of the design – for example, the offshoot of the dark blue line between Johannesburg Park and […]

Fantasy Map: Tyneride BRT Network Map

September 30, 2013
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Utterly plausible bus rapid transit (BRT) system map for the Tyneside region of England, designed as if it was a division of the Tyne & Wear Metro. While I can’t comment on whether Nexus/Metro would ever actually operate its own BRT network, I certainly can’t fault the aesthetics of the map itself. It’s absolutely spot-on, mimicking the look of the official Metro rail map (Nov 2011, 3.5 stars) perfectly. The 30/60-degree angles and the use […]

Aerial View of Public Transport Routes in Budapest, Hungary

September 27, 2013
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transporteconomics: This is an aerial view of surface public transport routes in Budapest, Hungary – the idea came from the work of Taylor Gibson posted on Transit Maps. Following the general convention in Budapest, bus lines are blue, trams are yellow, trolleys are red, and suburban railways are shown in green. As for the direction of the image, the Danube flows approximately from the north (upper right corner) to the south (lower left corner). Elevation […]

Historical Map: TriMet Bus System Map, Portland, Oregon, 1978

September 27, 2013
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Not much use for route planning: this map was really made just to show how the routes that ran into the city centre were grouped into geographic regions and denoted by a colour and an icon. While stops along the transit mall are now marked with boring old letters, back then these cheery and oh-so-1970s symbols guided you to the bus stop you needed. Also very 1970s: the tightly-kerned Avant Garde typeface. Source: TriMet’s “How […]

Project: My Reworking of the New Sydney Trains Map

September 27, 2013
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Okay, I couldn’t help myself: I just had to redraw this thing to illustrate all the points I talked about earlier – correcting the obvious errors I discovered in my technical review, and also addressing the general thoughts of my initial post. So here it is: not a redesign, but a reworking of the design concept while working within the established principles of the official map. If you’re just starting out with designing transit maps, […]

Historical Map: Boston Rapid Transit Map, early 1980s

September 25, 2013
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Submitted by “Some Assembly Required” who says: I’ve been enjoying your site for some time and recently remembered that I have an old MBTA system map in my basement. It came into my possession via a roommate over 20 years ago; I’m not sure how that person came to have it, but it probably wasn’t entirely legal. It’s a piece of metal (some sort of tin?) so I believe it was removed from a station. […]

Detail – Elephant & Castle, London Bus Map

September 25, 2013
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When you have sixteen routes passing through one stop, it might be time to rethink your approach to station/interchange design. I do note that the current TfL “Buses from Elephant & Castle” spider map (external PDF link) shows this interchange with a geographical street map – a huge improvement which also has the advantage of showing you exactly where each bus stand is (there are eighteen!) and which buses stop at them. Source: Mach V/Flickr

Technical Review: New Sydney Trains Network Map

September 24, 2013
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It seems that the draft Sydney Trains map that I posted about the other day is the real thing: printed timetables featuring it have been seen and scanned. So, I started looking at it again in order to write a proper review, when I started to notice a lot of little technical things that – as a designer – I found jarring and inconsistent. I opened the PDF file in Adobe Illustrator and began to […]

Submission – Historical Map: Bus Network, Beijing, China, c. 1950

September 24, 2013
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A very rudimentary and crudely printed bus map from Beijing in the early 1950s. Identifying landmarks seem to consist solely of the city’s ancient inner and outer fortified walls (which were about to be mostly torn down by this time) and what looks like the outline of the Temple of Heaven towards the bottom of the map. The original forum post (see source below) says that some of the routes shown here are still numbered […]