Fantasy Map: Highways of the Netherlands Diagram by AS Veen

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Inspired by (but not derivative of) my own Interstates as Subway Map, here’s a nice diagrammatic take on the “A-Road” highway network of the Netherlands. It’s a relatively simple system, so the one-colour approach used here works quite well. It also illustrates the European tendency for major highways to bypass or loop around a city, rather than putting an Interstate right through the middle of downtown, as so often happens here in the U.S.

Design-wise, the map is nice and clean and easy to follow: the longer highways have reassurance markers placed along their length to keep you on track. The urban areas are called out with a minimum of fuss, but help to give valuable context to the road network – however, maybe Maastricht could be included as the obvious “final” major destination of the A2 before it exits the country?

Another interesting excercise here – if up for a challenge! – might be to overlay the European E-Road network on these highways to give a broader pan-European context to the network as well. For example, the E-19 route starts in Amsterdam, follows the A4 through The Hague, onto the A13 and A20 past Rotterdam, before heading south on the A16 into Belgium. The other two-digit E-Roads in the Netherlands are the E-22, E-25, E-30, E-31, E-34 and the E-35.

Overall, this is a lovely effort that simplifies the highways of the Netherlands down to their simplest elements, and looks good while doing it.

Source: asvdveen/Flickr

Fantasy Map: Springfield Transit Authority Map from “The Simpsons”

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Fantasy Maps, Popular Culture

From the Season 25 episode that premiered last night, “The Winter of His Content”. Looks like the (supposedly abandoned!) system has had a complete overhaul, expansion and rebranding since its previous appearance (second image).

Then again, Springfield’s never made very rational decisions about public transit (monorail monorail monorail…)

Source: Simpsons Wiki

Photo: A Washington DC Metro strip map that’s just bound to cause confusion…

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Here’s an example of an overly designed strip map that’s gone horribly wrong. This photo was taken by Bryan Rodda, who notes that the sign makes it appear that Foggy Bottom-GWU is the name of the main interchange station between the Silver, Blue and Orange Lines in the center of the photo.

Anyone who knows the DC Metro system will know that the station in question is actually Rosslyn, but the map makes this horribly ambiguous. The problem stems from the fact that all the station names are offset from their markers up and along a 45-degree axis. It seems a reasonable thing to do in theory, but what it has actually done is position most of the labels almost directly above the next station marker to the right, where it can reasonably be confused as belonging to that marker.

Good design should not create confusion or make things unnecessarily ambiguous for the end user – it should always simplify and clarify: something this map absolutely fails to do.

Source: Bryan Rodda/Twitter

Historical Map: Hamburg Hoch- und Untergrundbahn, c. 1912

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Historical Maps

A beautiful old map showing Hamburg’s Ringbahn and spur lines. I believe that this map is from no later than January 1912, and it may be from even earlier, as the legend denotes that all the routes shown in red (the beginnings of today’s U-Bahn system) are “intended for execution” – that is, planned or under construction, not actually built.

Construction of the Ringbahn began in 1906, and the first section between Rathaus and Barmbek stations was opened on February 15, 1912. The ring was completed by the end of June that year. The spur lines as shown on this map opened in stages between 1913 and 1915.

See also: this amazing Hamburg train carriage ceiling map from 1915.

Source: mapsolutely/Tumblr

Unofficial Future Map: Metro Denver Rapid Transit by Steve Boland

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Long-time readers will know that I’m not a huge fan of Denver’s current light rail map (April 2013, 2 stars). And it seems that I’m not the only one, as Steve Boland of calurbanist.com has turned his hand to designing a new map. We’ve featured his excellent Bay Area Rapid Transit map previously (Feb. 2013, 4.5 stars).

His Denver map includes all the FasTracks extensions – light rail along I-225 through Aurora, BRT lanes on US 36 to Boulder and new commuter rail lines to all points north, including a line out to Denver International Airport (finally!). Interestingly, he’s chosen to color-code the services by corridor, rather than by route designation, which actually works quite nicely and simplifies the map in the dense downtown core. The map also makes the peak-hour only nature of the “C” and “F” light rail routes visually obvious on the map by adding a white stroke to their route line: a nice usability touch.

Technically, the map is infinitely better drawn than the official one: no wobbly route lines here! I do miss the sweeping arc that the light rail lines make from Auraria West around to Union Station – I always felt that if it was drawn better, it could be the defining visual “hook” of the official map – but the squared off look does fit in well with the overall aesthetics of this map.

Personally, I find the kink in the “G” line at Aurora a little visually distracting in such a clean diagram, but Steve tells me he really wanted to show how the line leaves the I-225 corridor at that point. As he consistently labels all the main roads that transit travels along on the map, this is probably a fair point.

An oddity: without knowing how all the new lines will fit into RTD’s fare structure, the map has to constrain that information to the currently existing parts of the system – which actually highlights the new parts rather nicely.

Our rating: That’s much better! Clean, crisp, functional informational design that builds excitement for the future of transit in Denver. Four stars.

Source: Calurbanist website

Photo: Boston Layers

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An old Boston T map peeks out from underneath the broken remnants of a recent edition, somewhere along the Orange Line in May 2013. It’s interesting to see that while the two maps occupy the same physical space, their use of it is much different. The older, simpler map fills up its space with bold lines and large type, while the modern map is more geographically based and complex – with the addition of bus routes and the Silver Line – and the type on it is correspondingly smaller.

Source: Boston Metropolitan Area Planning Council – MAPC/Flickr

Submission – Historical Map: Informational Leaflet, Metro de Santiago, 1975

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Historical Maps

When moon-monolith sent me the new Santiago Metro map that I featured yesterday, he also sent me this fascinating old map from 1975: the year that the Metro first opened.

The map itself probably redefines the term “basic” when it comes to transit maps, with some very coarse route lines and type-written station names. However, I’m more interested in the map as a very early look at the current system.

At first glance, it looks like the map shows two extensive lines – Lines 1 (Red) and 2 (Yellow) – with planned future routes for Lines 3, 4 and 5. However, in 1975, all that was open was a small stretch of Line 1 between San Pablo and La Moneda stations. You can just make out this section on the map, as it’s ringed with a thicker black outline – although the map makers erroneously identify the eastern end as Neptuno station, not San Pablo (which seems to be missing a station marker anyway).

So what the map really shows is the existing system, with fairly well-developed plans for the rest of Line 1 and Line 2. Then things get a little nebulous with the other planned lines. As we can see on the current map, Lines 4 and 5 follow different routes to those shown here, while (a completely different) Line 3 is still under planning to this day!

Also, due to the very early stages of planning shown on this map, many stations have completely different names to the current system, or were never actually built.

This map is certainly not going to win any awards for its looks, but it’s definitely a fascinating historical document of the early days of Santiago’s Metro.

Source: Tercera Cultura article on “Ghosts of the Santiago Metro” – Spanish

New Official Map: Metro de Santiago, Chile, 2014

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Here’s a new map for Santiago’s extensive Metro system. I reviewed the previous one back in March of 2012, giving it a pretty generous 3 stars.

In a way, this is really an evolution of the previous map, rather than a complete redesign – the routes still sit on top of a stylised street grid of the city, for example – but the execution is much more polished and stylish.

The whole city has been expanded horizontally (the map is rectangular now instead of the almost square proportions of the previous one). With more room to breathe, the labels for all the stations can be set horizontally instead of at angles for easier reading. The deletion of the express route information that was previously shown for Line 1 also helps with the cleaner look.

Informational icons have been simplified and standardised: instead of the entire (and complex) logo for the innovative BiblioMetro program, we now just have a quickly-identifiable (and universally understood) book icon. The standard “bike” symbol also works a lot better than the previous BiciMetro logo.

Things aren’t perfect, though: the poor old airport still loiters up in the top left hand corner of the map with absolutely no way illustrated to actually get there, and there’s some inconsistent and poorly drawn curves on the river. Look especially at the one to the northwest of Puente Cal y Canto station… ugly!

Our rating: An definite improvement! Three-and-a-half stars.

Source: Official Metro de Santiago website

New Subway Map-Themed Game in Development: Mini Metro!

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Popular Culture

This looks extremely promising, especially since development on Third Rail seems to have stalled (no updates on progress since mid-last year). It’s being developed by small New Zealand-based studio, Dinosaur Polo Club (great name and logo!). Here’s the preamble from their website:

Mini Metro is a minimalist subway simulation game about designing efficient subway networks. The player must constantly redesign their line layout to meet the needs of a rapidly-growing city.

The game, currently available as a rough and ready alpha version (that’s pre-beta, folks!), currently has four maps – London, New York, Paris and one other that I haven’t identified as yet. Each map in the game looks like that of its real life equivalent, right down to the colours used to represent routes: a neat touch! That’s London seen in the mesmerising GIF above.

In short, I want to play this right now. Hurry up and take my money.

Developer’s Project Site | Devblog

Photo: Brio Train Set Transit Map

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Fantasy Maps, Miscellany

Submitted by gartenriese, who says:

I found this on a wooden toy station from Brio. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to look up what transit network this is supposed to resemble.

Transit Maps says:

Well, this is just adorable. I doubt that it represents any real world transit system, but it looks like it has both trains and buses!