Here’s a very handsome map of transit in 1941 Montreal, provided by the Montreal Tramways Company, or La Compagnie des Tramways de Montreal. Despite the name, there’s also a healthy (and growing) number of bus routes on this map, shown in blue. Cleverly, the map rotates the city away from true north in order to fit everything onto the sheet of paper allocated, and the north pointer used is simply lovely, even including the company’s […]
Here’s a variant Boston MBTA map I’ve never seen before: a version with 60-degree angled lines, instead of 45 degrees. Apart from that, it looks very much like the standard late-1960s/early 1970s Cambridge 7 spider map, although there’s some weird inconsistencies like the Green Line “A” Watertown branch (closed 1968) and Quincy Center (opened 1971) on the same map. Here’s the interesting part. This map lives in the one and only mock-up of an MBTA […]
This little tip is thanks to RG, who left a comment on the site asking: “Can you comment on how you make the 2pt of white space between lines show when you have lines cross over each other?” On most transit maps, route lines will cross over each other at various points. Most of the time, an interchange station exists at that point and the symbol for that covers up the lines as they cross. […]
Awesome old publicity photos that seem to feature a helpful TTC guide explaining the system map to Betty Draper. Also, the illustrations around the map itself are kind of incredible. The newfangled subway has only been open for three years at this point in time. Compare to this similarly amazing TTC photo from 1966. Source: torontohistory/Tumblr – site no longer active
I got an request from an anon last week which asked: “Hey! Could you do a video tutorial on how to bypass Illustrator’s annoying round corners effect in case of 45 degrees? It would be a lifesaver!” Now, while you’re not going to get a video tut out of me – I don’t have the resources, time or know-how to produce one of those – I can and will share my battle-tested personal approach to […]
Heh. Love the expression on his face. Source: TGKW/Flickr
Beautiful vintage match box cover with a little map showing the location of the “Fuji Restaurant” in Hiroshima relative to the nearby streetcar line. Source: maraid/Flickr
While researching yesterday’s post about Pittsburgh’s light rail map, I came across this, the full system map – showing light rail, BRT (busways) and buses – produced by the Port Authority of Allegheny County and available on their website. That’s right: the map image has been sliced up into multiple .png files and placed into an HTML table. A table with a staggering fifty-one separate cells. It’s like a time warp back to 1996 or […]
Submitted by Dan Daly, who says: Here is the Pittsburgh light rail map. I would love to hear your thoughts on it. In my opinion it is kinda useless not because of it’s design but because it only covers the light rail. Very little of the urban part of the city is actually covered in this map. If the busways were fully included with station names and the links to the T stops it would […]
For a long period of time, the San Francisco Municipal Railway, (commonly shortened to just “Muni”) used pretty much exactly the same map in their brochures. It seems that each year, they’d simply make any amendments required – addition of new routes, deletion of old ones, etc. – and then reprint the brochure/map in a new colour combination. The earliest example I can find, from 1952, uses a sombre two-color palette of black and red, […]
