Month: November 2013

Official Map: “BUZ” Frequent Service Bus Network, Brisbane, Australia

November 6, 2013
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“BUZ” apparently stands for “Bus Upgrade Zone”, a somewhat convoluted way to refer to frequent service routes – every 10 minutes in peak periods and every 15 minutes at other times. That Brisbane has 20 such frequent service routes is actually pretty impressive, but the map itself is not. What a horrible, twisted, messy, scraggly attempt at a network map this is. Completely diagrammatic in some parts, and overly precise in others: what is with […]

Historical Map: The Burlington Route (Chicago to San Francisco), 1879

November 6, 2013
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Here’s a beautiful map from the glory days of American railroading, showing the route from Chicago to San Francisco via Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and California. Amtrak’s modern-day California Zephyr still calls at many of the same locations between Chicago and Omaha to the east and from Elko to Oakland in the west, but takes a different route through the middle, using Colorado instead of Wyoming. Although presented as one continuous route, the […]

Tutorial: Applying a Stroke Behind Type in Adobe Illustrator

November 5, 2013
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Let me preface this tutorial by saying that — without a shadow of a doubt — this is my number one most favourite, time-saving, map-making Adobe Illustrator trick ever. When making transit maps, it’s preferable — for both aesthetics and readability — to not have any labels overlay a route line or other elements. However, sometimes it’s simply unavoidable, as in the detail of my Boston MBTA map redesign at the top of the image above […]

Submission – Unofficial Map: Sydney Trains Aerial Image

November 4, 2013
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Submitted by thatlattesipper. Sydney Trains routes (complete with new “T-line” branding) for the north and west of the city overlaid on a Google Earth image. If nothing else, this map reminds us of how staggeringly huge Greater Sydney really is. It’s 20 kilometres in a straight line from the dot representing Central Station at the lower left to Hornsby (just off the right of the map), and over 30km from Central to Prospect Reservoir, the […]

Historical Map: Thüringerwaldbahn Tram Mural, Tabarz, East Germany, 1989

November 4, 2013
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A photo from 1989 of a newly-painted mural celebrating 60 years of the Thüringerwaldbahn, an interurban tram service running 22km between Gotha and Tabarz. As the original poster on Flickr notes, the scale of the map is “fanciful”, but it’s really meant more as a (rather lovely) decorative overview than an actual map. I’d be interested to know if the mural is still there, some 24-odd years later. Source: sludgegulper/Flickr

Historical Map: New York IRT Sytem Baseball Season Opening Map, 1923

November 1, 2013
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A simple little map from “The Elevated Express” gazette showing the convenience of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company’s services to “all three parks” – Ebbets Field (Brooklyn Dodgers), Polo Grounds (New York Giants) and Yankee Stadium (New York Yankees). The last stadium is of particular interest as this is the year that it opened – the first game at Yankee Stadium was held April 18th, 1923 against the Boston Red Sox. According to the New […]