Author: Cameron Booth

Infographic: Amtrak On-Time Performance by Route

July 10, 2014
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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

July 7, 2014
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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. […]

Submission – Unofficial Map: Park and Ride Commuter Bus, Northern New Mexico by Isaac Fischer

July 6, 2014
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Isaac submitted this in two parts, which I’ve combined into one post here.  Of the first image, Isaac says: This is the map that New Mexico Park and Ride provides in their system timetable; it’s probably the worst designed transit map I’ve ever seen. Not only is the design quality abhorrent, but it doesn’t even show the routes as even REMOTELY geographically accurate, and fails to include about two-thirds of the stops. Why they felt […]

Historical Map: East Berlin U- and S-Bahn Map, 1988

July 5, 2014
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Another amazing historical map from that most fascinating of transit map cities, Berlin. This one shows the U-Bahn and S-Bahn networks of East Berlin in July 1988, just over a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. West Berlin is entirely omitted, with the S-Bahn ending at Friedrichstrasse with no indication of what lies further west of that point: not even a sektorengrenze. The numbers at each station indicate the travel time from the […]

Historical Map: Sydney Rail Network, Early 1980s

July 5, 2014
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The latest this can be from is 1984, as Abbatoirs station closed in November of that year. I remember versions of this above the seats on the old “red rattlers” as I travelled from Epping to Petersham for school in 1985, so they were still around after their “use by” date. In a way, this is actually one of my favourite versions of the Sydney rail map, as it has a pleasingly compact shape that […]

Historical Map: TriMet Bus and MAX Routes, Portland, Oregon (early 1990s)

June 30, 2014
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Certainly no later than 1998 as the MAX light rail only consists of the original Westside route (later to be the Blue Line). Of note is the continued use of the service zone icons – fish, rain, snow, beaver, leaf, rose and deer – that defined Portland’s downtown transit mall for decades. I’ve featured them before on this map from 1978, but it’s on this map where their main failing comes to the fore. Because […]

Historical Map: Map of Greyhound Lines and Principal Connecting Routes, 1938

June 30, 2014
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From a booklet promoting sightseeing via Greyhound’s long-distance bus lines, which sounds like an absolutely awful way to see America. However, it’s a very handsome two-colour map that certainly highlights the apparent density of the network at that time. Source: Umpqua/Flickr