All posts filed under: Official Maps

Submission: New Washington, DC Metro Strip Map at Pentagon City

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Submitted by Peter Dovak, who says:  Spotted a new schematic installed at Pentagon City Metro station in Washington this week. I’m not sure if this is experimental or what, but I’ve never seen such detailed line info at a station here before. Not a huge fan of the execution, though, the labels are awful skewed! Transit Maps says: In the limited space allowed here, angled station labels are pretty much the only workable option. It’s […]

Official Map: Tri-Rail Commuter Rail, Southern Florida, 2013

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I’ve had a couple of requests to review this one, so here goes… For me, this map is an excellent example of the overwhelming averageness of a lot of transit mapping here in the US. Yes, it does the job – you can work out how to get from here to there and where to make connections – but it’s just so completely bland and unmemorable. Everything about the map seems to be completely generic, […]

Official Map: Public Transport Network of Debrecen, Hungary, 2013

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Sent my way via a comment left on the website regarding the woeful map of Szeged, Hungary (Sept. 2013, 0.5 stars), here’s another truly awful transit map from Hungary: this one from its second-largest city, Debrecen. In short, it’s an absolute disaster. Route lines branch off in any direction (no constraining angles to 45-degree increments for this bad boy!), while labels are jammed in wherever they can fit, at any old angle. The labelling is […]

Official Map: Isometric JR West System Map

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I’m not sure if I’ve ever been so completely, madly and totally in love with a transit map as I am with this. A giant, sprawling, isometric representation of much of Japan showing JR Group railway lines. The map is produced by the JR West company, and its operating area is shown in full detail within the green area (apart from the heavily urbanised areas around Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe, where – wisely – not all […]

Official Map: Gauteng Metrorail, South Africa, 2013

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Submitted by scsj, who says: Metrorail in Gauteng (Johannesburg/Pretoria/Soweto/Germiston), South Africa. I don’t know, I find this map monumentally confusing. There are way too many colors and none of the lines have names, there’s no scale or anything to indicate location other than station names, it’s so cramped, and it sacrifices too much geographic accuracy for the sake of the design – for example, the offshoot of the dark blue line between Johannesburg Park and […]

Detail – Elephant & Castle, London Bus Map

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When you have sixteen routes passing through one stop, it might be time to rethink your approach to station/interchange design. I do note that the current TfL “Buses from Elephant & Castle” spider map (external PDF link) shows this interchange with a geographical street map – a huge improvement which also has the advantage of showing you exactly where each bus stand is (there are eighteen!) and which buses stop at them. Source: Mach V/Flickr

Photo – Official Map: Rhätische Bahn, Switzerland, 2013

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The Rhätishe Bahn (or Rhaetian Railway) is a publically-owned Swiss railway, serving the huge and mountainous canton of Graübunden. The Swiss Federal Railways extend only a few kilometres over the cantonal border to the capital at Chur, as seen at the top of this interesting little map. Placed underneath the window on trains, between facing rows of seats, this map features something I’ve never seen on a diagrammatic map before: elevation contours. Four colours — green, […]

Future Map: Greater Sydney Intercity Trains Network

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With the removal of intercity train routes from the new Sydney Trains map, the question is – where did they go? The answer: onto a new map of their very own! Aesthetically, it’s very similar to the Sydney map, part of what I understand is a major effort to unify all transit services that Transport for NSW provides. The layout of the lines is very clear and easy to understand, and having separate maps makes […]