I came across this on YouTube the other day, and thought it was definitely worth sharing. It’s quite long (clocking in at well over an hour if you include the Q&A session at the end), but there’s a lot of great insight into both the history of the MBTA map, and of Ken’s personal journey designing the map over the years. Of particular interest is how the whole redesign via a crowd-sourced contest a few […]
Hey, everyone – it’s official! Transit Maps has a new home, free of Tumblr and all the drama that goes with it at last. It’s been an interesting experience importing everything into WordPress, but I think almost everything has been transferred properly. There’s still a lot of clean up work to be done to format everything nicely, so please excuse any mess you might see. Everything from now back to the end of 2016 has […]
So, after almost a month, 32 matches, and some 37,000 votes, the inaugural Transit Maps World Cup has reached its conclusion. Unexpectedly, perhaps, the victor wasn’t London, Moscow or one of the other pre-tournament favourites, but the Santiago Metro of Chile. Without a doubt, this win was engineered by a huge social media blitz within Chile which mobilized a large number of people to vote for “their” map. I don’t really think that the Metro itself […]
Let’s have some fun! Presented here are 32 cities from around the world (12 from the Americas, 12 from Europe and 8 from Asia), representing a wide range of rail-based rapid transit map design. They’re arranged into four groups of eight: the Red and Blue Lines contain cities from the Americas, while the Green and Orange Lines are comprised of European cities. The 8 Asian cities have been spread evenly across the four groups and […]
We’ve featured plenty of Nick’s work on Transit Maps before – he has an uncanny knack of taking something familiar and mundane and looking at it from a completely new perspective. His new project, “Between Stations” is no exception, as he literally pulls apart subway systems from around the world and rearranges them into attractive circular forms. No scaling or rotation of the line segments is performed, they’re just rearranged to fill the circle. What’s really interesting […]
A classic New Yorker cover, showing the much-maligned Second Avenue Subway (still five years from completion of even Phase 1 at the time of publication) wending its way past a series of increasingly unlikely stations. Papua New Guinea, Saturn and the Yukon Territories are my favourites.
In the USA, new transit takes time. Whether it’s Environmental Impact Statements that take seven years to write, or tunnel boring machines that take longer than expected to do their work, or lawsuits from people angry that light rail might take away one of their beloved exit ramps, or mayors who want to rip up new streetcar tracks after they’ve been installed… the list goes on. China, however, is a completely different matter… as this […]
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
You weren’t doing anything productive today, were you? Because this neat online game has the potential to waste hours – or even days – of your life as you attempt to build the perfect subway system. Tweak the existing system to make it just so, or start from scratch and build your own dream network. The game will rate you on estimated ridership and per-ride cost, as compared against the baseline of the current system. […]
Look what I just found while going through some dusty old boxes! I picked this lovely Tube Map bathroom tile up at the London Transport Museum in 2004, and brought it with me when I moved to the U.S. – where it has unfortunately remained in its box ever since. As best I can tell, it was made by artist Tony Davis around 2001, and was part of a set of six tiles that covered most […]
