As much as I hate to admit it, this is actually pretty darn awesome. With its 45-degree angles, it’s definitely channelling the Vignelli diagram far more than the squiggly official map.
Source: jeffliebig/Flickr
Submitted by opspe, who says:
This is my concept for what an integrated regional inter-city rail network in the Northwest could look like, if things had developed that way. All there is now (regionally) is Cascades, which I ride all the time, but it’s still rather limited. I decided to include the local commuter rail lines (WES, Sounder, WCE) too. I also decided to beef up CalTrans a bit – they don’t actually serve Redding, although it’s in discussion.
I sort of based the concept on the National Rail network in the UK, although things had to be scaled up a bit. The area shown is about 2.5 times the size of the UK, after all. I decided to include the main communities the lines pass through, rather than have a ton of whistle stops. To me that makes it feel more…functional, for lack of a better word – more like a proper, seamless system. That being said, I think the scale belies the vastness of the region, so if I were to make smaller-scale maps for individual routes, I would probably include “whistle-stop sections” along the route. But that’s TMI for an overview.
The routes are all current rail lines, in various states of freight usage or disrepair. I think the section between Juntura and Burns has been scrubbed entirely, but the grade is still there. There are several other minor infrastructure adjustments that would be needed too (downtown Hillsboro comes to mind).
As far as design goes, it seemed best to include some stylized geographical accuracy rather than have it be too rectilinear. I tried to make the route names somewhat geographic, but I also numbered them for clarity. Route 1 (CascadesExpress) I had imagined as being a high-speed line, as opposed to the more local routes 2 and 3. Together they replace Amtrak Cascades (but keep the name for continuity).
Tumblr and/or Dropbox will likely crush the resolution, but the idea is that it’s supposed to be a big map, such as you would find mounted inside a station, or as a PDF online.
I’m curious what you think of it.
Transit Maps says:
Overall, this is a fine effort, which could just use a little polishing here and there to make it a quite excellent fantasy map. A couple of areas stand out to me for potential improvements:
First, the insets at the top, right and bottom of the map – all for just a few stations each – really make it look like you just ran out of room and didn’t want to go back and rework things. There’s lots of room on a map this big to tighten things up and make everything fit without insets. Even bringing all your stations just a tiny bit closer together across the entire map can create a surprising amount of extra space. For mine, insets should only be used when the complexity of the system at that point can’t reasonably be shown any other way: the inset of the Loop on the official Chicago “L” map stands as a good example of this.
Secondly, you could work a little more on stylizing and simplifying your coastline and rivers. The San Juan Islands look particularly blocky to me, and I think the Columbia River would look so much nicer if it had sweeping curves as it changed direction, rather than the harsh angles you currently have. Remember, the style of your background should complement your route lines, not draw attention away from them.
I also think the thick black border around your legend is a little heavy handed, but that’s a very minor thing.
One thing on the operational aspect of your system (which I don’t normally comment on too much, preferring just to focus on the technical and aesthetic qualities of the map)… I’m not sure any regional/commuter rail system would ever run a route one way up one side of a river and the other direction on the opposite bank like you’ve done with Line 12 in British Columbia. It’s just not at all practical for users! Imagine if I live in Agassiz, and I commute to Vancouver each day: I drive my car to Agassiz station and catch the train. Coming home, I can only return to Chilliwack, which is nowhere near where I left my car. Maybe there are shuttle buses between the two stations, but that just seems incredibly inefficient. I would suggest that most regional rail systems would have one route along the side of the river that serves the most people, or maybe – just maybe! – they’d split the service (but halve the frequency) in both directions on both sides of the river.
The inset central zone London Underground map is a black and white version of Beck’s diagram from the same year, but really, this is all about the fantastic illustrations (by Peter Roberson) and groovy mid-century graphic design. There’s only two colours used here – black and pink – but they’ve been used in a very striking and eye-catching way.
I wonder what was on the reverse of this?
Source: smallritual/Flickr
Occasionally, I get in a bit of a rut with Transit Maps – I feel like I’ve seen everything there is to see, or that I’m just treading water – and then something like this comes along that just blows me away.
This poster, designed by Andrea Spinosa of the CityRailways blog (in Italian), provides an incredible look at rail mass transit in Italy, and it’s simply superb.
The centre of the poster gives a country-wide overview, showing where the different urban networks are and the distribution of transit modes – Metro, commuter rail, regional rail, trams and even funiculars (which seem to be surprisingly popular in Italy!).
The real highlight for me, however, are the 15 maps around the edge of the poster that show the transit systems of different cities/regions around Italy. I’ve included images of four of these maps above. Not unlike Jug Cerovic’s INAT maps (April 2014), the new maps redraw these systems using one consistent style for everything, and it looks good. Pretty much all of them look better than their corresponding official map, especially Naples. The typeface used looks like our old friend, Neutraface. I particularly like all the custom icons for points of interest, including ones for Mt. Vesuvius and Mt. Etna, each drawn with the appropriate profile for each volcano.
There’s a lot to take in here, and I definitely recommend that you head on over to the CityRailways site and check the poster PDF out in full. Each of the city maps is also available as a separate, pocket-sized PDF that you can download and print out, or just put on your mobile device and use it that way. There are lots of other great maps to be found on the site as well.
Our rating: Brilliant, comprehensive and beautiful. I’d put this poster on my wall! Five stars!
Source: CityRailways site
An anonymous follower sent me this message:
I got Illustrator CC and trying to work with new Live Corners feature for my 45 degree angles but I just can’t get the value past a certain point 8.12 (as an example) so I can’t match the location of the 2 corners so the lines actually match. Keep up the great work with this Tumblr it has been a real inspiration for me.
This can be a little frustrating, but once you understand how the Live Corners feature works, you can build your diagrams more effectively to avoid this happening in the future.
Basically, Live Corners needs enough length along a line segment to allow it to add new bezier points that define the curve of the radius. If it encounters any other points (even stray points in an otherwise straight path) in the line before the radius you’ve defined is reached, it will use that point to define the maximum radius instead.
Let’s look at two examples. In the first (red) example above, we simply have two line segments that have ample length to accept the Live Corners radius that we enter: in this case, 200 points. Everything works as expected.
In the second (green) example, the horizontal segment only has a length of 100 points, limiting the maximum radius that can be defined. If we select the two corner points that are highlighted and attempt to give both of them a Live Corners radius of 200 points, Illustrator does some maths behind the scenes and determines that the maximum radius it can allow is 119.5 points (there’s some sine/cos/tan trigonometry going on here that I can’t be bothered to work out). That’s because the bezier points that it creates for the curves touch at this value and simply can’t cross over each other. You could define one curve as bigger than the other, but the maximum combined radius value for both curves in this example would be 239 points (119.5 times two). So you could have one radius at 200 points, but the other would max out at 39 points.
So, if you have route lines on your map that change direction a lot in a short distance, your maximum allowable Live Corners radius will get smaller. Either define smaller radii in your diagram, or simplify it to allow larger ones to be used! It also goes without saying that all your route lines have to be joined properly.
Hope this helps!
A very simple map showing the first segment of Los Angeles’ Red Line on its opening in January 1993. The Blue Line (part of which is also shown on this map) had opened three years earlier.
The map is mainly notable for the “RTD” logo that belonged to the Southern California Regional Transit District, the immediate ancestor of today’s Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA, or more commonly, just “Metro”). In fact, the LACMTA was formed just a few months after this map was produced.
Source: Flickr/Striderv (no longer active)
Submitted by Chris Bastian. An old, out-of-date wall map of the Rome–Pantano railway. Until 2008, the line ran from the Roma Termini station out to Pantano, a suburb to the east of Rome. Since then, the line has been cut back to Giardinetti (the station near the ring road shown on this map), as the eastern portion of the line is being converted into part of the new Metro Line 3.
Also of note is the depiction of island or side platforms on the map: always nice to know which side of the train to get off!
Submitted by Bernie, whose excellent map of Singapore (Nov. 2013, 3.5 stars) has already been featured on this site. Bernie says:
Hi Cameron,
I saw your post about the new Victorian Rail Network concept map (April 2014, 3.5 stars) by PTV and was very impressed – it’s quite a quantum leap forward from the existing map. I thought I’d have a go at further redefining the map, but for the Melbourne Metro network only. (I personally don’t see the value in putting the regional/metro network in one map – an average user won’t really need both networks together, and as you say, scale is an issue.)
Quite naturally, the City Loop is used as the visual focal point. I was hoping it could be placed in the centre of the map, but given the lopsided nature of Melbourne, it was not quite possible. I have added some of the proposed extensions for the network, including the metro tunnel running through the city, creating a bypass from the congested loop. (This tunnel is currently attracting lots of debate – the latest government proposal is to run it south of the loop via Montague – although I prefer the original proposed route and have shown that on the map.)
Stopping patterns are shown as they are relatively simple compared to Sydney’s. Most routes operate all stops, or with one all stops and one limited stops service. With recent interest on “clockface” or “turn-up-and-go” services, the map indicates which stations have services at least every 15 minutes or better during the daytime.
Each line is assigned a letter code for easier identification, especially for tourists. The letters are assigned in a counterclockwise order, starting with A-Line for Airport (Tullamarine) services.
Melbourne public transport uses a fare zone system, but the number of zones have been reduced over the years. I would actually prefer to have more zones, which result in the ability to charge fares more commensurate with the distance travelled. This map shows fare zones in 10km increments from Southern Cross station. (I also have a cleaner version of the map omitting the zones.)
The font used is Source Sans Pro – thanks so much for the tip! It is indeed a really great font. Very visually pleasing with high legibility. Perfect for maps.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the map.
Transit Maps says:
This is great work once again from Bernie: a very attractive map that features some distinctive and lovely flowing route lines. The representation of the City Loop as a perfect circle is deftly handled and a perfect focal point for the map (the ever-important visual “hook” that helps a map stand out from the crowd). However, I’m not so keen on the way that the labels for the stations on the loop are angled as if they were spokes on a wheel – Bernie’s done an otherwise excellent job of constraining labels to just two angles (horizontal and reading up from bottom left to top right), and this just seems a little gimmicky and fussy to me.
Bernie’s frequency icons are a nice usability touch (it’s always nice to know that you’re never more than 15 minutes away from the next train!), but I’m less convinced by his attempts to show service patterns. Looking at the legend, he’s using eight different station icons to convey this information, which is a lot to ask users of the map to remember. And it can be pretty tricky to tell some of those icons apart visually. I’m generally in favour of letting timetables deal with the nitty-gritty of showing local/express route combinations, and this treatment doesn’t really convince me otherwise, although I certainly appreciate the effort Bernie has put into it.
Speaking of the legend, it really is beautifully put together and very comprehensive. Placing it neatly into Port Phillip Bay really works pretty much perfectly.
About the only other comment I have is regarding Bernie’s proposed route naming conventions. If I was giving route designations based simply on the alphabet as Bernie has done here, I would start at the one nearest the 12 o’clock position (probably Bernie’s “T” South Morang route) and continue in a clockwise direction, rather than anti-clockwise. It’s simply far more intuitive to use a universally understood convention like this to make finding route lines easier. Yes, “A” for “Airport” is hard to resist, but none of the other routes have any correlation between their destination stations and the letter designation, so the “A” should be as easy to find as possible.
Our rating: Looks fabulous, but perhaps tries a little too hard to convey a lot of information. Still, I have to applaud Bernie for pushing the envelope and attempting something a little out of the box (and mainly succeeding). Three-and-a-half stars.
Sent my way by David Edmondson of The Greater Marin, this is an incredibly large (the dimensions of the PDF are 145″ x 101″ or 386cm x 256cm!) and very comprehensive map of the planned Pearl River Delta Rapid Transit system. Currently under construction, the idea behind the system is to have every major urban area in the region to be less than an hour away from Guangzhou (the huge urban area in the blue part of the map) by rail.
The map shows not only these planned regional rail lines, but also the extensive Metro systems that many of the major cities have (or will have in the near future – Macau’s people mover as shown in the detail above is not yet built, for example). Interestingly, the map doesn’t seem to make any distinction between the regional services and the Metros: all are depicted by route lines of equal weight, meaning the map lacks a decent informational hierarchy.
Oh, and in case you hadn’t noticed, the map is also retina-searing bright. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a transit map where the background uses multiple colours that are all as intense and bright as the route lines themselves. It creates a lot of visual dissonance – that effect where edges almost seem to shimmer or vibrate because the clash of colours is so strong – especially where red or magenta meets blue. On the other hand, we also have blue rivers passing through a blue province, which is also a problem.
I also think that the map can’t really decide if it’s a diagram or a geographical map – it has elements of both: simplified route lines versus incredibly detailed waterways that seem to show every twist and turn, for example. The map probably could have benefitted from some further expansion of the denser areas: there’s plenty of empty space in other parts of the map that could have perhaps been used more effectively. As it is, I’m wondering whether a standard topographical map with the routes overlaid wouldn’t actually have been more informational…
Our rating: A grand scope (which I love), and it’s certainly unique, but it hurts my eyes to look at it. Two stars.
Source: @theGreaterMarin/Twitter
Submitted by criacow, who says:
Check out this wayfinding sign at St. George Station in the TTC subway here in Toronto. (My blurry photo, but TTC signage.) Up is north, but *left* is *east*—they flipped on an axis rather than rotating—and ‘eastbound’ isn’t noted anywhere. I’ve lived here for years and even I was confused by this until I looked at the specific station names!
Transit Maps says:
I’ll agree that this does look odd at first glance, but I’d bet the map points in the right direction (i.e., Kennedy station is to the left of this viewpoint, with the train entering the station from the right). In effect, this is actually a strip map, showing stations in the direction of travel from this platform, rather than a true system map where the cardinal directions point the way you expect.
I think what really throws you (and probably many others!) is the reversal of the distinctive “U-shape” of the Yonge–University–Spadina line (or should that just be “Line 1” now?).
