Month: July 2014

Historical Map: Nicholson’s Complete London Guide Bus Map, c. 1980

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Unofficial Maps

Unusual and potentially confusing bus map that chooses to colour-code routes by the major thoroughfare that they travel down: all Oxford Street buses are orange, all Farringdon Road buses are lime green, etc. However it’s all a bit of a mess, made more so by the strangely yellow/orange-heavy colour palette. Westminster Bridge is crossed by six routes; five of them are way too similar to each other (orange-brown, yellow, orange, another orange-brown and lime green). […]

Submission – Historical Map, Boston Elevated Railway System, 1932

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Historical Maps

Submitted by emotingviamemes, who says: This is an old Boston Elevated Railway Company map from a user guide I purchased at the wonderful Ward Maps store in Cambridge, MA. It’s a lovely relic of its time! The rest of the guide gives transit directions to landmarks and points of interest. I’m not exactly sure why the modern day Blue and Red Lines are the same color on here, unless some color had faded with age. […]

Submission – Unofficial Map: Intercity and Commuter Rail of North America’s East Coast by Edward Powell

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Unofficial Maps

Submitted by Isaac Fischer, who says: Here’s a neat map I found online that shows the entire American east coast, as well as southeastern Canada. It shows both commuter and intercity rail lines. As far as I can tell, it seems fairly accurate, and could definitely be useful. Transit Maps says: While there’s more than a passing resemblance to my own Amtrak Passenger Rail map here – both in the general aesthetics of the map […]

Infographic: Amtrak On-Time Performance by Route

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Visualizations

A neat little map/infographic accompanying an interesting article in the Washington Post about Amtrak’s inability to actually get people places on-time. Well, that’s what happens when you don’t own most of your track and freight trains get priority… but I digress. The map does a good job at presenting the information in an interesting manner: the use of green to differentiate between “vaguely acceptable performance” and the varying shades of “are we ever going to […]

Fantasy Map: 2014 Tour de France as a London Tube Map by Joe McNamara

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Fantasy Maps

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve got nothing against the “… as a subway/tube map” design trope. Having created more than a few of this type of map myself, I’d be a pretty sad hypocrite if I said otherwise. However, it does bug me when a map in this style fails to live up to the fundamental underlying design principles of the piece that inspired it, and that’s what’s happened here. Obviously drawing inspiration from H.C. […]