Project: International E-Road Network Diagram, 2020 Revision

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My Transit Maps

Finally! A comprehensive reworking and redrawing of one of my original projects – a diagram of the European International E-Road network. First drawn back in 2010, It’s a piece that’s always had a place in my heart, but I’ve always put off updating or reworking it over the years because I was just never quite sure how to bring anything new to the table.

However, the recent successful revision of my Interstate Highways as Subway Diagram convinced me that I could use that design language to reinvigorate this old project – and I think it’s definitely been successful! View the map in the window below – you can zoom in and out, pan around, and also go full screen. Or, you can also click here to experience the map in a full browser window.

First things first: this is unapologetically a diagram, not a map. The whole idea here was to fit as much of the network legibly into a square canvas as I could, which means that Eastern Europe and Russia get compressed horizontally – a lot. The Black Sea becomes taller than it is wide, and Turkey gets reduced to a fraction of its actual width. A comparison to the official United Nations map of the network (below) drives home just how large and empty the eastern part of the map would be without this compression (and how cramped Western Europe would be in comparison!), so I think some distortion is a fair price to pay.

A sidenote for those wondering how colours are assigned to the routes. The UNECE document that defines the network defines roads with numbers divisible by 5 (E-5, E-10, E-15, etc.) as “main roads”. These are generally the longest, and help define the shape of the overall network. These roads have been given bright, subway map-like colours in order to reflect their relative importance. All other routes are “intermediate roads”, and are given a subsidiary grey colour. Even-numbered routes (generally running east-west) are slightly darker than odd-numbered routes in order to tell them apart.

Looking back on the original map, there were definitely a few areas that I concentrated on for improvement this time around.

First, I designed the diagram to fit a specific canvas. Back in 2010, I just drew until I was done, and then added the final dimensions at the end to suit what I’d drawn. And it shows: there’s a big empty area of ocean to the left, and the whole thing just feels a bit unbalanced. This time around, I purposefully set out to make the diagram fit into a square canvas – and at the end, it fitted exactly as I had planned: no rescaling of elements or moving things around to make it fit. You can’t ask for better than that!

Secondly, I worked much harder at spacing elements more evenly across the whole map to miminise large empty areas. The same underlying 96-point grid that I used on my Interstates diagram informed a lot of my decisions here, which definitely gives more visual rhythm to the composition. Reducing Scandinavia’s overall size helped a lot, as it visually dominated the old version; as did moving Moscow further north (to somewhere approximating its spatially correct place).

Next: typography. The 2010 version used the ubiquitous and oh-so-dull Myriad Pro Condensed, simply because it was pretty much the only typeface I had at the time that was a) condensed enough to work on the map, and b) had a full range of characters to support the Eastern European and Turkish place names on the map. Now, just as my new Interstates diagram employs the official U.S. highway roadsign typeface “Interstate”, the new E-Roads diagram uses TERN – a typeface family developed by Erik Spiekermann for use on highway roadsigns in Europe. So far, it’s only been adopted in Austria and Slovakia, but it’s still a very appropriate choice for a diagram of European highways! Erik actually sent me this font family in return for a PDF of the original version of this diagram back in 2010, so I’m thrilled to be finally using it in this update! Comparatively, the labels are also set quite a bit bigger now, something I’m very happy about.

Because everything was fitting into place so well, I wanted to see if I could include secondary labels for place names if that country used a different alphabet – and that’s where I ran into some problems. While TERN supports Greek characters and has a wide range of diacritics, it doesn’t go any further east – no Cyrillic, and certainly no Georgian, Armenian, etc. In the end, I set most of these secondary labels in Fira Sans Compressed – it’s not an identical match, but as it’s also a Spiekermann-designed typeface, it bears many of the same design hallmarks and does the job pretty well. Some hunting around on the Internet revealed some appropriate fonts for the few labels that had to be set in more esoteric character sets. All these secondary place names have all just been pasted in from the relevant Wikipedia entries, so I hope there’s no errors (please tell me if there are!). Secondary names are also included in Gaelic for Ireland and Scotland, and in Welsh for Wales – just for fun. I did toy with the idea of showing the “alternate” names for cities in Belgium – the French names in Flanders, and the Dutch names in Wallonia – but that just seemed too fussy in the end.

Other improvements: I massively simplified the coastline this time around to be more in-keeping with the idea that this is a simplified diagram. There were definitely parts with way too much detail before! With one exception*, islands only appear if they have cities connected to the network on them – so no Balearic Islands or Cyprus or Isle of Man or random islands in the fjords of Norway. I’ve also made the visual distinction between routes across water that are actually served by a ferry line (a thicker line), and those that are just hypothetical joining lines between two otherwise disconnected points along a given route (thinner lines). I imagine that some of these could change in the future: until fairly recently, you could catch a ferry from Odesa, Ukraine to Samsun, Turkey across the Black Sea, but not at this moment in time.

One thing I wasn’t expecting at first was new extensions to some of the routes! E-16 used to run from Londonderry/Doire to Oslo, but now it runs all the the way across the Scandinavian peninsula to end at Gävle in Sweden. E-45 has been extended north from Karesuando in Sweden to pass through Finland and end at Alta, Norway. And finally, E-66 now completes something of a bypass of Budapest, running east and north of its old terminus at Székesfehérvár to now end at Szolnok. I was able to incorporate all of these amendments with a minimum of fuss, and I also double-checked and refined the intermediate routing of some roads for better accuracy than the previous version. I noticed that Google and Bing Maps have decided to extend E-86 into Albania from Greece, but I can’t find any official documentation of this change – its western terminus remains as Krystallopigi for now.

As always, your thoughts, comments and corrections are welcome! What do you think of the new interactive presentation of the diagram? Let me know in the comments below!

Note: * The one exception is the Isle of Wight, because the dent in the south coast of England up to Southampton (the Solent) just looked silly without it.

24 Comments

  1. Richard Kelleher says

    Great map. What’s the distiction between colour, dark grey and light grey for routes?

    • It’s pretty simple: the United Nations document that defines the E-Road network designates roads that have a number ending in “0” or “5” as “major roads” – these are generally the longest roads and define the overall network. So these get a colour to highlight their importance. All the other routes are “intermediate roads”, so they’re shown in a subsidiary grey. Even-numbered routes (ones that generally run east-west) get a slightly darker grey than the odd-numbered routes so that they can be told apart easily.

      You may notice that E-4 in Sweden also gets a colour – that’s because it was meant to be renumbered as E-55 at one point but all the signs for the previous designation of E-4 had already been put up! So Sweden was allowed to keep the old E-4 number (even though it’s out of place on the numbered grid), but I treat it as a logical extension of E-55 for the purposes of this diagram. Sweden’s early signage is also why E-6 goes north-south, not east-west.

  2. Kevin says

    Looks fantastic. I think the natural line of things between UK and Ireland would be Holyhead/Dublin rather than Liverpool. Also the Limerick Shannon, while a diagram threw me a little. Limerick is further south and kicks back up to Shannon. That’s just some local observations but looks fantastic overall. Lots of fun scrolling.

    • Yes, Dublin to Holyhead would be more logical, but that’s not what’s defined in the UNECE document that outlines the routes – which is what the diagram is showing.

  3. Great piece of work again! Really eyepleasing!

    How did you decide on which cities to depict along the routes (that have no intersection).

    • Thanks, Tim! For the most part, the diagram shows all the cities that are listed in the UNECE document that defines the control cities along each route. If I had to add a city to fill in some blank areas, I used a combination of looking at maps and reading Wikipedia entries to determine which ones should be added. Larger populations and name recognition were factors in my decision.

  4. shrimpocat says

    Great map. But unlike Interstates in the U.S., E-roads play no role whatsoever in the mind of the average European traveler.

    • Well, it depends where in Europe you are, I think. In Norway and Sweden, for example, they’re the only route number assigned to a road, so they are used by the general public there. The UK doesn’t even sign them at all, but most of the rest of Europe co-signs E-Roads alongside their national route numbers, so I guess most would be dimly aware of them?

      To be honest, the strange, almost hypothetical, nature of the network (a virtual pan-European network laid down using existing national routes!) was what drew me to mapping it in the first place!

  5. James says

    Hi, think you have got the Humber ferry routes confused. The passenger ferry from Hull runs to Rotterdam and the freight route from Immingham goes to Esbjerg.

    Love your map

    • James, the routes the E-Roads take across water often have very little to do with actual ferry routes. They simply follow the specifications laid out by the United Nations document that defines the network. And that document says that E-20 goes Hull -> Esbjerg, and E-22 goes Immingham -> Amsterdam, however strange and wrong that actually is. That’s why the diagram uses thin lines to denote connections between points across water that aren’t actually ferry routes.

  6. Heidi fearn says

    Do you do this as a print in canvas. I would live to have one hanging on my wall. Its beautiful

    • Heidi, prints are are coming in the new year. I don’t offer canvas in my own print store (I print on a really nice 230gsm art paper), but I could upload the file to a commercial print-on-demand store (Society6, Redbubble, Artflakes, etc.) if you really wanted that option.

    • Tricky, yes. I went with “Bruxelles” in the end. Despite the city officially being bilingual, French is the lingua franca with over 90% of the inhabitants being able to speak it (from Wikipedia). I also think that the French form of the name looks nicer, so personal taste won out in the end.

  7. What’s the asterisk near some cities like Moscow or Amsterdam for? I guess several of the of the colored, not-divisible-by-5 routes in Eastern Europe are also anomalies where they were meant to be major routes? (e.g. 101, 117, 119)

    • The star next to some city names is surprisingly simple, Jeff – it simply denotes capitals (and, yes, Amsterdam is the official capital of the Netherlands; the Hague is the seat of government).

      Yes, those non-divisible-by-five odd-numbered routes are meant to be that way: once the odd numbers get past 100, they’re all upgraded to “major road” status – mainly because the network keeps extending eastwards for thousands of miles. E10 through E90 can cover Europe from top to bottom pretty easily, but the same can’t be said for E5 through E95. The last major odd number is actually E127, which runs south from Omsk, Russia to Kapchagay, Kazakhstan – a long way off the eastern edge of this diagram.

  8. Hello. Regarding place names, I strongly suggest sticking with the official naming everywhere, i.e. use bilingual wherever official and legally mandated, in the “correct” order, i.e. you should display Bolzano – Bozen, Fortezza – Franzenfeste, Helsinki – Helsingfors, Turku – Åbo, Bruxelles – Brussel, Donostia – San Sebastian, Biel – Bienne, and others.

    Awesome map otherwise, good design choices. I congratulate you on the correct use of Romanian ș and Turkish ş, a rarely seen distinction.

  9. Rich Thomas says

    How wonderful!

    A note about the western terminus of E22 and islands: Caergybi/Holyhead isn’t on the Welsh mainland, and isn’t actually on the large island Ynys Môn (Anglesey) either, but on the small Ynys Gybi/Holy Island. The road crosses Ynys Môn on its way to the mainland.

    • Hi Rich – absolutely true! However, I’ve made a deliberate and conscious decision to simplify coastline as much as possible on this diagram, so subtleties like that are somewhat lost. If you want actual geographical fidelity, then a real map is going to serve your needs far better than this diagram of roads.

  10. Hi Cameron. Good work. Interesting map concept, this could be a really useful map, something that sits inside the front cover of a european road atlas. The audience potentially would be business, holidaymakers & haulers, these days might be more used to Sat-Navs & Google rather than an atlas or a subway map. As a semi-frequent traveller across this region, here are some suggestions: Definitely agree with kiwifi on the place names – use the official naming of the places, which would be the version found on the road signs. Colours – Unlike a subway map, where you’re trying to navigate over a dense city or region, for example you’re on a journey across a country, you won’t generally have too many route choices like in a dense city. This is a diagram of routes where corridors are miles apart, so I don’t see why you couldn’t use one range of hues (say, blue) for north-south, and one for east-west (say, red) – and then use the rest of the colour spectrum for the routes that are currently greys, and maybe regionalise these too. The capitals would be so much better in Bold, if the typeface allows (I’m not a big fan of that typeface in this form though, it’s obviously great on a road sign). It might be worth adding borders too – perhaps that can be a light grey shading outside the Customs Union of the EU? (as it’s different to Schengen – perhaps Schengen Passport controls could have an asterisk at these points) Ferry routes which aren’t official might be worth making a dash – You could look at breaking the ‘E-only’ rule & adding ferry routes to the the islands in the Med such as Malta & Cyprus.. And, I know it’s not meant to be geographic, but might be worth adding the land mass of Africa underneath Spain, the names of the seas. And finally, to emphasize the ‘E’, how about adding the ‘E’ to each number on the map, and maybe a different typeface for the E number. Keep up the great website!

  11. Hello Cameron. How exactly did you make this? Did you draw it out on paper and then somehow transfer it onto a computer and refine it there? If so, could you please give me some insight into how you did that?

    • I work directly in Adobe Illustrator these days, as I normally have a pretty good idea of the “rules” of the map… font size, how I want to draw interchanges, the underlying grid, etc. If there’s a particularly complex part, I might make a quick sketch on some graph paper to work it out, but that’s about it. However, I also have over a decade of experience in making transit maps (still learning, still improving!), so it’s something that seems easy to me now after a lot of hard work and experimentation over the years.

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