While Dinosaur Polo Club’s Mini Metro – the minimalistic subway building game – has been available for PC via the Steam gaming portal for some time now, it’s only just been ported to mobile devices in the last couple of weeks. Always on the lookout for a fun little game to while away my commute to work, I picked it up for my iPhone almost immediately. Really, how could someone who runs a blog called […]
Submitted by Chris Bastian, who says: Houston light rail map (2016); one core line (red); two spurs (green/purple) with planned extensions shown. Transit Maps says: I can understand that METRO is proud of their two new lines, but at this point they’ve been open for almost a year and a half. I think we can lose the awkward “NOW OPEN” shaded boxes now and reserve that treatment solely for the future two-station extension to the Green […]
Transit Maps is five today! (That’s like 80 in Internet Years, right?) Thanks to everyone who has joined me on the journey so far – there’s still so much more to come. Check out the archive for a look at everything to date, or visit a random post for laughs! All the best, Cameron
Remember back in August when the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) asked for the public’s input on where future subways in the city might run by means of an interactive “draw a subway map” tool? Well, they’ve just released the collated results of that survey – which had some 2,600 respondents – as a heat map, and the results are certainly definitive. It would seem that almost everyone wants a subway line along the […]
I love it when people take my criticism of a map and use it as inspiration to come up with an alternative solution. Having seen my recent review of the new official map (October 2016, 1.5 stars), Peter took it upon himself to redesign it – and quickly, taking less than a day to come up with his version. Peter obviously agreed with a lot of my concerns about the official map, because he’s addressed […]
Phil Roe is a London Underground employee with over 40 years of service. While working in ticket offices in the 1970s, he was worried that he was too slow in calculating fares for customers, so he drew up his own fare zone diagrams for each station he worked at. The example below is for Green Park station, and the fares are in pence! His maps predate the official usage of zones on the Tube Map, […]
Submitted by lukasmaps, who says: I think I’m gonna hurl… Shows buses, but NOT the Metromover? Come on. Transit Maps says: Well, it at least shows the stations that you can transfer to the Metromover at (all two of them), so it’s kind of on par with the buses – no actual bus routes are shown, just a list of numbers at each station. Showing the Metromover on this map is problematic because of the disparate […]
Via long-time correspondent and fellow map-maker Andrew Smithers (check out his Project Mapping website if you haven’t done it yet!) comes this superb diagram of mainline rail services in 1976 France. It was created by famed Swiss designer Rudi Meyer, who was also responsible for the original – and very distinctive – Paris RER map in 1977-1978. The map is certainly very striking, using a bold blue and green colour palette and minimal distractions from […]
Submitted by nerdwiththehat, who says: Any thoughts on the MBTA map from The Simpsons’ Boston lambast bash last night? Looks like the new design. Transit Maps says: It sure does, although it has a cunningly crafted square “T” logo to prevent confusion with the real thing. The background water layer has also been deleted, probably to make the route lines stand out a little more obviously. Curiously, it’s labelled as a “bus routes map”, but overall, this is […]
Jug Cerovic – whose work has been featured many times on Transit Maps – has decided to collect all 40 maps designed using his “INAT” design language into one very handsome printed volume, funded – as many self-published books are these days – by a Kickstarter campaign. It’s not just the maps, though: there’s a comprehensive introduction to the philosophy behind the maps (which I have read and enjoyed), as well as annotations and thoughts on […]
