Check out this eye-poppingly bright bus map from Spokane, Washington, brought to my attention by Zachary Ziegler of the Transit 509 blog. Produced by a local design firm, this seems to be the first attempt at any sort of bus map in Spokane. It’s notable for the interesting way that the route lines overprint each other when they cross, which creates an interesting sort of plaid pattern where many routes meet downtown. Adorable little colour-coded buses can be seen traversing the routes, and there are some simple drawings of notable landmarks scattered around the map as well. I’d hazard a guess that the route lines were actually created with some kind of adhesive film cut to shape: you can see the rough joins where some routes change direction. This would have been much quicker than drawing all the route lines by hand (we’re still quite a few years before computers in design here).
Our rating: A lovely little bit of 1980s ephemera, but looking fairly dated and clumsy by today’s standards. Lots of clip art (love the girl in the bikini repeated for every swimming pool in town!) and really, really bright colours. Two-and-a-half stars.
Compare to the current Spokane bus map by CHK America (February 2012, 4 stars).
I’m very pleased to report that full production of the 44″ x 72″ Highways of the United States posters has begun. I’d like to thank everyone who has ordered so far for their patience as we got this process up and running.
As you can see from the attached video, printing these beasts is quite the epic task: each poster takes about half an hour to run through the printer!
Simply beautiful rail line and junction map from the earliest days of what would become the London Underground. Extremely notable for its use of colour-coding to differentiate between the lines of all the different operating companies. In the days of chromolithographic printing, using this many different colours would have been an expensive, highly technical and time-consuming task.
The following text is taken from the raremaps.com description of this map:
Extremely rare early Austrian edition of John Airey’s famous Railway Junction Diagram of London (not in the British Library!).
The present map is an early Austrian edition of Airey’s most important single map, Airey’s Railway Map of London and its Suburbs, illustrating the innumerable railway lines leading out of London, and importantly depicting the earliest two lines of the new London Underground System, along with at least one proposed line which was never constructed. Airey published his first edition of the map under that title in 1875, which subsequently ran into several editions. It, in turn, was based on a map that appeared in Airey’s book, Railway Map Diagrams (London, 1867).
The map’s fascinating an innovative visual composition was originally conceived as part of a series of diagrams illustrating the rapidly expanding routes of the various railways throughout Britain. With its carefully placed and labeled colored lines, it is the true precursor to Henry Beck’s celebrated London Underground Map of 1933. In this sense, Airey’s maps were the first truly modern rail transport maps, and they set the gold standard for such publications throughout Europe and America.
London was the first major city to be served by railways (a technology invented in 1830), with the first line connecting London Bridge and Greenwich being completed in 1836. During the ‘Railway Boom’ of the 1840s, eight new lines were added connecting London with the countryside in virtually every direction. Since that time, two new major lines had been added and new spurs had been built to access different parts of the city. Airey was commissioned to produce his diagrams by the Railway Clearing House (RHC), founded in 1842, it acted as an umbrella organization to collect and manage revenue from the various independent railway lines.
Perhaps the most important aspects of the map are the inclusion of the World’s first two Underground (or Subway Lines), the Metropolitan Line and the Metropolitan District Line (the original components of today’s District and Circle Lines). The Metropolitan Line was first opened in January 1863, while the District Metropolitan was completed in December 1868. Airey’s diagram shows how the new medium of the Underground integrated with the established railways.
The map also records the proposed location for one of the early underground lines which was never constructed, the London Central Railway. The London Central Railway was formed in late 1871 for an unsuccessful north-south promotion sponsored by the Midland Railway and the South Eastern Railway, for a link between St Pancras and Charing Cross Stations. The name again surfaced In 1884, when a London Central Railway Company sought unsuccessfully for authority to build an electrically operated line from Trafalgar Square to St Martins-le-Grand via Oxford Circus and Oxford Street. This was intended to be an extension of the Charing Cross & Waterloo Electric Railway (now part of the Bakerloo line). This was authorized in 1882 but never built.
The present, apparently unrecorded, edition of the map, may have been first published in 1876 in Vienna by the publishing firm of R. v. Waldheim, a leading house specializing in newspapers, music books and lithographic prints. From the inscription in the upper-right corner, it seems that the present map was originally issued within a book. While it is not clear which publication it is, it is possible that the map was associated with a later edition of the rare work Die Concurrenz im Eisenbahnwesen, a railway book first published by Waldheim in 1873. In any event, it is a fascinating testament to the contemporary pan-European fascination with Airey’s groundbreaking cartography.
Our rating: Simply beautiful: detailed in scope, but amazingly clear and simple in execution. Five stars.
Let’s continue our recent look at small- to medium-sized German bus networks with this network map from Schwäbisch Gmünd in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, submitted by Bert.
I find this map interesting, because it really shouldn’t work as well as it does. While simplified, there doesn’t seem to be any real logic or unifying design principles behind the angles used for the route lines: they just seem to be drawn to make the routes fit together. Despite that, the map is pretty easy to follow and use. Part of that comes from the fact that there’s only ten different routes to show – it’s always easier to make a comprehensible map for a simple system – but some thought seems to have been put into making the labels as legible as possible and the route lines as easy to follow as they can be. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s a bajillion times better than the awful effort from Marburg, and probably even as successful as the map from Göttingen.
Our rating: Somehow better than the sum of its parts. Three stars.
A Note on the Making of Oklahoma City’s Transit Map
I recently had a pleasure of designing a system map for EMBARK, Oklahoma City’s transit agency. The network is being made both more frequent and more direct to meet a growing demand. Oklahoma City is often compared to Austin, Texas for their effort to re-imagine the state’s biggest city to be less car-depended and more human-scale and user-friendly. I’m proud to be a part of that evolution.
I didn’t want to move away from geographically-accurate representation completely, but rather settle somewhere in between: The map is not quite a GIS-overlay, but neither it is a subway-style diagrammatic map. This hybrid approach had already been deployed by KickMap and CHK America elsewhere (see the map CHK America created for Spokane Transit). I wanted to replicate the simplicity and usability of those maps.
Oklahoma City’s gridded geography naturally fits that format.
The map’s layout is based on a modular grid. Each module is about 100 points across, which roughly corresponds to the city’s one-mile mega block, which consists of regular-sized blocks bound by arterial roads:
Taking advantage of the existing geography, I started it out with 45 and 90-degree angles, but had to add additional increments to follow the geography more closely:
Because buses do not run on every street, it made sense to only label the transit streets and the streets leading up to them. Rest of geographic features were allowed to “fade away”:
Finally, icons play a major role in calling out major destinations located along bus routes. Visually unified with the brand style, they work just as well at small sizes as they do at big sizes:
I can’t believe I haven’t reblogged this already. Great overview of the process behind a new, stylish, modern, usable system map for a smaller transit agency.
My favourite thing – and something map designers need to always bear in mind – is the beautiful, simple icons used. Icons on a map often have to work at very small sizes, so each one needs its own distinctive “shape” to quickly differentiate between them. The “squint test” is always a good thing to do: print your icons out, put them a decent distance away and look at them through half-closed eyes. If you can still identify each icon’s basic shape or outline, you’re in business. If they all just start looking like a generic blob… it’s time to redesign and refine!
Man, this map sure manages to make depicting one line a lot of hard work. Despite the simple diagrammatic style, stations are still cramped together so close towards the top of the map that the labels have to be randomly placed on either side of the route line, rather than being spaced far enough apart to place them all neatly on one side. The map doesn’t give enough geographical context to justify this “accurate” placement of stations, so even spacing would work much better. If needed, stations in the city centre could be spaced closer together than the outlying Park-n-Ride stations, but the spacing for each type should be even.
Why is the “Blue Line” label all the way over by I-77? What happens when I-77 meets I-485? Apparently, they just end. South Boulevard has a label, but no road. The prominent north pointer is actually not a lot of use, as the diagram doesn’t really conform to reality anyway. In the real world, the line runs almost directly north-south from Woodlawn all the way down to the I-485/South Boulevard station, rather than NE-SW as indicated here. But that would get in the way of the legend, so we get what we get…
Our rating: Not horrendous, but a few little tweaks could make it so much nicer. Two stars.
Thomas, who is a ninth-grader (i.e., he’s just 14 or 15 years old), says:
Sydney, my home town, has around 4.7 million people and already has a commuter rail network, however, the city is growing, and the network doesn’t cover everything, so I have augmented the network in many places, as well as showing how it could grow into the currently undeveloped far south- and north-west (they are generally the places where the stations have no names, there simply aren’t currently any for them). It is show by the thick lines. Also represented by the thick lines is the long planned north-west rail link in light green/khaki. Additionally, the map shows bus rapid transitways and light rail in half thickness, some built, some planned, and some I propose. Finally, the map shows the intercity trains as far as the city limits in quarter thickness, as well as an extra express service from the planned Badgerys Creek Airport to the existing Kingsford-Smith airport and the city loop.
Transit Maps says:
Being a native Sydneysider myself, I can’t help but laugh at the sheer audacity of some of Thomas’ proposals for new lines. Yes, it’d be great if there was a rail line running up through the Northern Beaches (from the southern side of the harbour via The Spit, no less!), but the geography of the area means it’ll realistically never happen.
Pipe dreams aside, the map is really quite beautifully drawn, especially for someone so young. His dream system is extremely complex, but everything fits together nicely with a good information hierarchy and harmonious colours. He’s even indicated ferry routes, busways and the extended light rail system to produce a fully multi-modal vision, which is great to see.
This is very promising work from Thomas: keep it up!
Submitted by Hubert at the same time as the awful Marburg map. Of this map, Hubert says:
Check out the intertwined lines in the city center! I find this approach very interesting and useful and I would really like to hear your thoughts about this.
Transit Maps says:
The intertwined (or “candy-striped”) lines in the city centre are definitely the most interesting thing about this map. The rest of it is a competent, if unexciting, diagram of bus services. Executed better than the horror of the Marburg map, but nothing too brilliant to be seen. The light green colour of the suburb name labels should serve as a lesson to the Marburg map makers, though!
Then we get to the middle of town, and the designers start to combine lines that follow the same one-way routes through town to save some space. I’m not normally a big advocate of this approach, because it can make routes more difficult to trace from end to end, but it really works well here.
Why? Because the designers have grouped similar colours together for each “bundle” of routes. So you have a “blue” grouped route, and “green”, “pink/purple” and “brown”, which means tracing the routes through the city is actually pretty easy. Note also that the angle of the striping is not quite at 45 degrees, which means you get to see all the colours used when the route line is at 45 degrees. Nicely done!
Our rating: A pretty standard bus diagram until you get to the city centre, which is really quite excellent. Combined, the map turns out to be just a little better than average. Three stars.
You really should review more ugly, messed up maps as they serve as deterrent examples. This eyesore of a map is what made me aware of the fact that transit map design is not as easy as it seems.
I once sat in line 7 and it took me twenty minutes to figure out whether the bus served the Elisabethkirche Station in my direction of travel. This is literally the worst transit map I’ve ever seen.
Transit Maps says:
It’s pretty hard to disagree with Hubert’s assessment of this map, which is a confusing, seething mass of route lines running at all sorts of random angles. Working out where some routes go in the central part of town is almost impossible, especially out of Elisabethkirche (as Hubert mentions), where some lines appear to head in both directions when they reach a T-junction just below that stop.
The labelling of suburbs/surrounding towns is poor: text badly aligned to heavy-handed grey boxes, which are jammed in wherever they’ll fit. The location of these labels also leads me to realise that the whole map is rotated so that east is at the bottom of the map (Cappel and Gisselberg are to the south of Marburg, not to the west). Being generous, this could align with a local’s view of the city, as it’s arranged along the banks of the north-south running River Lahn (not shown on the map), but would adding a north pointer for clarity really have been that hard?
For me, the map isn’t quite as bad as this one from Meiningen (although it bears a lot of similarities), but it’s pretty darn close. Ugly, technically deficient and almost entirely useless.
Sidenote: Lines 1 through 20 (with some gaps), then Line 383? What’s that about?
Our rating: Still bad enough for no stars, even if it is just a teensy bit better than Meiningen’s dismal effort.
