Month: June 2014

Poster: Helping London Grow for the Future, Transport for London

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Advertising, Official Maps

London’s certainly come a long way since the Metropolitan Line first opened in 1863 with wooden carriages and steam engines. I wonder what a Victorian-era Londoner would think of this modern skyline, all soaring, glimmering, curving glass? Source: transportforlondon/Tumblr – link no longer active

Historical Map: San Francisco BART & Buses Map, September 1977

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Historical Maps

Front cover for a 1977 map of BART and connecting bus services with some great late-1970s typography: tightly spaced Helvetica, yum! That BART icon is also pretty amazing and is just asking to be digitally recreated. However, there’s something screwy about that map, as much of BART appears to be located in or underneath the San Francisco Bay. Global warming, perhaps? Hardly: some quick Photoshop analysis reveals that  the underlying map has simply been erroneously rotated […]

Photo: Mexico City Metro Linea 3 Map… or List

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Official Maps

About as simple and directly to-the-point as a line map can get. Really, it’s just a bulleted list, with each station’s icon serving as the bullet. Of note though, is how each icon has its own very distinct shape within the square (with a rounded corner) framework. Each is easily identifiable, even from a bit of a distance.  Source: dogseat/Flickr

Historical Map: Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board – Proposals for General Scheme, 1923

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Historical Maps

Another great planning map from almost 100 years ago. Melbourne, of course, is one city that has retained its trams over the years, rather than tearing them all out, only to eventually replace them with light rail or new trams in the modern day. trammuseum: Here’s a great map that we’ve just added to our archives today. Authored by the M&MTB’s Chief Engineer T.P. Strickland in 1923 and overlaid on a Sands & McDougall map of Metropolitan […]

Unofficial Map: Transit Network of Norfolk, Virginia by Jonah Adkins

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Unofficial Maps

This is a nice little map from Jonah, whose transit map version of his Noland Trail Map I featured back in July last year. The map certainly does a good job of placing the new light rail line in a regional context, with the Elizabeth River and the Interstate highways defining the surrounding area nicely. Points of interest and county/city borders are nicely shown as well. However, I disagree a bit with Jonah’s informational hierarchy. […]

Historical Map: Rapid Transit Plan by the City of Seattle, 1920

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Historical Maps

Here’s an interesting map that shows a plan for rapid transit that city engineers envisioned for Seattle way back in 1920, almost 100 years ago! The map shows a subway running beneath Third Avenue from Virginia to Yesler, coming to the surface near the railroad stations – essentially the route followed by the present-day Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. Trains going up to Capitol Hill would follow a line up Pine Street that would be alternately […]

Official Map: Transit of Magdeburg, Germany, 2014

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Official Maps

Submitted by keks63, who says: I really enjoy your blog, so I thought I would submit the transit map of my nearest German city. The network features 9 tram lines (1 to 10, they did not make a line 7 for some reason), and several bus and ferry lines. The city has about 200,000 inhabitants, and the tram serves all the important areas, you do not need a car to live in Magdeburg, which is […]

Official Map: Daytime Transport Services of Budapest, Hungary, 2014

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In addition to the Metro/suburban rail only map that was introduced with the new Metro Line 4, there’s also this more comprehensive city map that adds tram, key bus routes, ferries and more to the mix. It’s more directly analogous to the old Budapest map (July 2012, 2.5 stars), and is also highly reminiscent of this Prague integrated transit map (August 2012, 4 stars). Definitely aimed at tourists (the PDF file even has the word […]