Submitted by Michael, who says:
Today, I would like to submit a different sort of map. Most time scale maps that I have seen so far (such as this one or this one) involve two common elements: a central station or origin, and concentric circles representing time. Though I believe that both of these are very good maps, this approach might be better suited to a city like Pittsburgh (where nearly everyone commutes to the central business district) rather than one such as the Bay Area (where there are many different destinations). I realized that it is possible to create a time scale map without a central origin or concentric circles. This map shows the result of my experiment, is based on the timetable of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, and shows the approximate travel times between all stations on the system.
Transit Maps says:
An interesting approach from Michael, and one that works well in this instance because of BART’s usage of 60-degree/hexagonal angles in its own official map. That hex map background definitely puts me in mind of the strategic war games I used to play when I was younger, though!
Michael’s system is certainly ingenious (one hex = one minute), and probably works pretty well even when transferring across lines because BART does make some use of timed transfers. Maybe you’d add five minutes instead of one when moving from one line to another just to be a little more realistic?
However, the biggest drawback for me is the sheer number of hexes from one end of a line to another: I count 90 total hexes on the Millbrae-Pittsburg line (i.e., 89 minutes from one end to the other) – that’s a lot of tedious manual counting and quite prone to error. This could perhaps be mitigated by stating the total time required for each line in the legend, or maybe by having subtotals indicated for common sections of track on the map. Daly City – Embarcadero: 18 minutes, for example – allowing quicker addition of larger sets of numbers, rather than having to manually add up each and every hex between here and there.
In a way, this map is simply a graphical representation of those old road map matrices; in which all the possible points of origin would be listed down the page, with all the destinations listed across. A reader would then cross-reference the two locations they required to determine the time and/or distance between them. This map is definitely much prettier to look at than that, but a matrix is actually a far more efficient way of displaying this type of data.
Our rating: An interesting approach to the problem, executed very stylishly. However, counting large numbers of hexes gets tedious very quickly and ultimately the map fails to impart its information quickly enough for longer trips. Two-and-a-half stars, but huge kudos for trying a different approach!