I’d like to submit an official map of public transport in Wrocław, Poland. The network consists of 23 tram lines, 61 city bus lines and 18 suburban bus lines. The most interesting is the circle tram line 0 which in fact is divided into two lines 0L (counter-clockwise) and 0P (clockwise). Inside the city of Wrocław it’s also possible to travel by train having a city’s public transport ticket.
Transit Maps says:
Fitting over 20 tram lines and almost 80 bus lines into a compact canvas like this is an almost impossible task, so you’ve got to admire the herculean effort made here. However, it’s undoubtedly difficult to use: there are only two colours for routes (magenta for trams and blue for buses) and you have to find and then painstakingly follow route numbers across the map. It’s one of my least favourite methods for marking routes, and this execution certainly doesn’t change my mind.
Unsurprisingly, the map gets quite cramped in places, and the labelling suffers a bit because of it – though I’ve definitely seen worse. Some good design discipline has been used to set up the major route axes of the map along 30°/60° angles, though the effect is somewhat spoiled by the dashed green fare zone boundary, which weaves its way drunkenly around the edge of the map. It even takes a little detour around some explanatory text at the bottom centre, which I find strangely amusing. The main rail lines are also drawn in a different style, taking naturalistic curves through the city. It does set them apart from the bus and tram lines, but it’s also stylistically a little jarring.
Our final word: A diagram like this might just work in the hands of a skilled designer like Jug Cerovic, but this attempt falls short for me.
Milan’s Metro has grown since I last reviewed the official map (way back in March 2012), with Line 5 now being open and Line 4 under construction – so a new review is long overdue.
The first thing I noticed is that the suburban lines have all been upgraded to have their own colour-coded route line instead of sharing a common colour as on previous maps. This makes them easier to understand and follow across the map, and certainly highlights the importance of Garibaldi station as the major suburban transportation hub. Garibaldi itself gets a unique diamond station marker and is situated at the dead centre of the map, so it really can’t be missed!
The Metro lines are nice and thick, and now have curves when they change direction instead of a hard corner, which make the map flow a bit better for me. However, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of rhythm or order to the layout and everything just seems a little messy to me. The angled labels aren’t helping matters, and are particularly unfortunate seeing as previous versions had labels that were all set horizontally. Condensed all-caps labels also aren’t the easiest to read.
Other notes: Quite a few stations seem to have secondary labels for nearby business headquarters – Bluvacanze, Widiba, etc. – though I don’t know if this is informational or as a result of commercial sponsorship deals. Whatever the reason, it’s just another layer of information that makes the map a little more crowded.
The addition of fare zones in fairly bright colours also introduces more visual noise, though it’s probably handled about as well as it could be. Most of the zones only apply to the eastern end of Line 2, though, so maybe there’s a cleaner way to apply this information.
Our final word: Feels a bit loose and unformed to me, though it’s perfectly usable. I always have difficulty relating Milan Metro maps to the historical centre of the city, and this one is no different. Haphazard labelling is probably its biggest downfall.
Source:LineaDiretta/Medium – click through for a brief history of the Milan Metro map from 1985 onwards.
I’m an amateur designer and, having had some free time during the pandemic, decided to try and make my first metro map. I found your site very useful while making the map. Thank you for your amazing collection of helpful tips and examples that helped me avoid many first-time mistakes I would otherwise have made.
This map is based on official info and speculation. My speculations and assumptions are based on press releases and official statements, so nothing in this map is too unreasonable. In all likelihood, about 80% of this map may be a reality in 10 years’ time.
I’ve designed it to be used by regular commuters, and not necessarily to sell the idea to people. Therefore, I’ve tried to design it for practical use and I’ve tried to make it minimalist but not boring. I’d love to hear your thoughts and ways to improve it.
Transit Maps says:
I’m so glad that this website was helpful in your first transit mapping endeavour, and I think it’s turned out pretty nicely as well! You’ve definitely done a good job of untangling the denser parts of the proposed network, and the mode differentiation between metro (solid lines) and commuter rail (cased) works well. Overall, it perhaps leans a little too much on the much-imitated London Tube design style, but I think almost everyone starts there before developing their own style: I know I did!
The full list of stations and their grid reference are a nice addition to a comprehensive legend, though I think the type is a bit small and could fit into the available space a bit better. Also, be wary of old style numerals (where the descenders drop below the baseline) in tabular information like this: it can make those grid references harder to read. If the font supports it (and many modern OpenType fonts do), set this information using tabular lining numerals instead. None of the digits will drop below the baseline, and all of them will take up the same width, making those grid references line up underneath each other far more neatly. This setting can be found in the OpenType options palette in InDesign and Illustrator, so check it out.
The complaint about small type continues to the labelling, especially the tiny text naming the lines – for something that’s meant to aid accessibility, it’s just far too small to be useful. Many transit maps use larger bullets with a letter or number representing the line’s designation at each terminus, which I generally think is more effective than tiny labels along the line itself.
Finally, I’m not entirely sure about the typeface used for the map’s title – Montserrat is a hard-working sans serif, but its alternate characters are definitely an acquired taste, especially that capital-slash-lowercase “M” and the curved “T”.
Our final word: For a first effort, this is really rather good! The bones of the map are solid, and most of the improvements really have to do with typography – which is often underlooked in transit map design. Keep at it!
Here’s a simple diagram for a hypothetical Seattle where Forward Thrust (the original ’60s subway) was actually built and where we would be today. If only we really had this level of transit.
I tried to make this kind of look like a diagram you might find in a newspaper, so it’s not super detailed with a legend and stuff. Or at least that’s my excuse for being lazy!
Transit Maps says:
A nice “what if?” map here from Henry, envisioning a Seattle where construction on a light rail network began in the 1960s instead of later… much later. It’s the little touches that I like, like the latest work package being called Forward Thrust 3 (or FT3) instead of the real world Sound Transit 3/ST3. It seems that in this alternate world, Sound Transit was never formed, as Henry places the ownership of the network with King County Metro.
The diagram itself does have that “newspaper infographic” feel, so I’d say it works as Henry intended. While simplification is good for that purpose, I’d still like to see a version with the bodies of water that do so much to define Seattle – Lake Union, Lake Washington and the Puget Sound itself. The reason this network looks so similar to the planned ST3 configuration of the real world is simply because Seattle is hemmed in by water and there’s very few viable routes.
One little technical thing I’d like to see fixed is the divergence of the red and blue lines south of Jackson station: if Henry nudged the change of direction on the red line down and to the right a bit more, the lines would change direction at the same point, which always looks a bit cleaner to me.
Our final word: A simple diagram of what could have been, made with a minimum of fuss. Works for me!
Remember metro orientation map of Prague you’ve reviewed back in 2012 (August 2012, 3.5 stars)? You might be surprised how little it changed since then. The framing you were uncertain about, little bits here and there, and… that’s pretty much it. This seems like an overhaul waiting to happen, doesn’t it?
So here I am trying to address some of the issues I believe are critical in terms of usability including the one you’ve pointed out back then, and I totally agree with (no tram routing). I’ve also introduced new subway line D which is currently under way just to explore how the whole thing scales. What do you think?
There’s a short story in case you’d like to learn more about my decision making.
Transit Maps says:
A rather lovely effort to “modernise” the Prague Metro map from Kostya, and one that’s mostly successful. I do like the large, sweeping curves used; they really lend a sense of elegance to the map. I do applaud the addition of route numbers to the tram lines, though I think in general the tram lines are too thin and the numbers too small to be easily read. It’s interesting to note that Kostya has actually taped his map up in a Metro car and come to much the same conclusion himself – I love it when designers test their work in real-world conditions!
The addition of information about bus transfers to the airport are another welcome addition, though it seems a pity not to at least indicate the Czech Railways Airport Express bus from Terminal 1 to the more centrally located Hlavní Nádraží as well.
Like the official map, Kostya uses icons to indicate points of interest, which I think could benefit from an explanatory legend. While locals may understand what the icons represent, Prague is a major tourist destination and these users probably need to be catered for.
Our final word: A stylish update that mostly works and certainly isn’t as clunky as the official map. The tram line could probably use some work to make them more legible in real-world usage.
Showing an alternate future where everything in a 2014 proposal actually got built, this is without a doubt one of the best looking Chicago transit maps I have ever seen – just lovely work from Michael. Many designers have tried to integrate the Loop into the main map instead of using an inset before, but rarely as successfully as this. Michaels’ Loop fits the scale of the rest of the map really well, and just looks like it belongs.
Despite being very information-dense (“L” lines, commuter rail lines and arterial bus routes all on one map!), everything feels very clean, spacious and well-organised. Colour is used intelligently to emphasise hierarchy – bright colours for the “L”, muted pastels for commuter rail lines, and grey for the bus routes.
It’s all so good that I can even overlook a couple of my personal dislikes – labels set in the same colour as the line they represent, and stations that are labelled multiple times – once for every service that terminates there. Sometimes you just have to let these things slide because the piece as a whole just works.
As a side note, how amazing would those crosstown “L” lines be if they actually existed, especially the O’Hare to Midway airport link? We can only hope and dream!
Our final word: Just awesome. It’s only January and this may already be my favourite map of 2021.
The Sofia Metro is a not-so-big metro system in the capital of Bulgaria. Although I’m not Bulgarian, nor live in Bulgaria, I’ve been there, and it’s quite nice. The following map is the latest one, from the opening of Line 3, on the 26th of August, this year. It’s quite simple, but unlike the previous ones, it’s far more consistent (as it uses the same angles, colors, stuff like that), and much more visually appealing. Any thoughts?
Transit Maps says:
Yes, this is a vast improvement over older Sofia Metro maps! To me, it looks like an evolution in design from the quasi-official version created and promoted by the Spazi Sofia NGO back in 2015 (review here – Cam). It uses the same icons for the points of interest, which suggests a shared parentage.
Overall, I quite like it, though some of the labelling is carelessly placed. The long leader line down to Ovcha Kupel II station is unnecessary, and quite a few names cut across route lines. The long station names and bilingual labels don’t help matters, but I feel that more care could perhaps have been taken.
The other main point of contention is the grey background to indicate the boundaries of the city – I feel that this is redundant and just makes the background busier than it needs to be. However, if it was removed, I guess the question of whether to continue to include the parkland areas would have to be addressed.
Our final word: A solid evolution of the work done by Spazi Sofia, now made fully official, it seems. There’s nothing truly outstanding about it, but it’s clean, simple and pleasing to the eye. 3 stars.
I thought you might enjoy poring over a transit+points of interest map I recently drew of Center City Philadelphia.
I’ve collected bird’s eye urban panoramas since I was a child, and I particularly enjoy panoramas that have placemaking and wayfinding value, such as those drawn by Jenni Sparks and other artists.
I also find there’s no better way to learn and demystify seemingly-complex bus service than drawing it a couple times over. Taking the lead from SEPTA’s own frequency map, here I attempted to demystify bus service for visitors by employing SEPTA’s new color-coded frequency classification, and by winnowing a selection of bus routes that permit the easiest gridlike travel across Center City so visitors aren’t forced to rely only on the spartan axes of the MFL and BSL.
The map was also fueled by a longing and impatience for the points of interest to reopen so that all the attractions of Center City (and other cities) can once again be enjoyed after COVID. Here’s to a better 2021 and 2022 and to the hopeful revival of the urban flaneur!
Zoom and pan the map in the window above, or use the full-screen button to view the map in full detail. If the button doesn’t work for you or you’re on a mobile device, use this link for a full browser window version.
Transit Maps says:
It’s a sign of just how much I love this that I asked Marc whether I could share it in my new zoomable map format, just so you can all get in super close and see the wonderful detail in this map. I just adore the stylised, textured base map – an aerial image run through some artistic Photoshop filters that’s then been cleaned up manually and tinted to highlight points of interest and parkland, which sounds like a lot of painstaking, time consuming work. The end result is worth it, though – the city looks like a city, with recognisable buildings and landmarks. I particularly like the way that taller buildings obscure transit lines on streets that are further away from our viewpoint – it’s this that really sells the dimensionality of the map, like we were in a hot air balloon tethered high above the streets below. It’s very definitely evocative of those old birds-eye view maps that Marc mentions with such fondness.
Marc’s other influence, Jenni Sparks, can certainly be seen in the juxtaposition of a detailed base map and bright, thick transit route lines, though Marc’s map is less chaotic than Jenni’s more organic illustrative pieces. Despite the busy background, all the transit lines stand out well and are easy to see and follow. I particularly like the way that Marc has added texture to the route lines so that they look like they belong to the rest of the map instead of just being plopped on top of it. If all this work wasn’t enough, Marc has also added some 245 points of interest to the map, making it an invaluable tool for visitors to the city. And really, that’s what this map should be for – printed and available for tourists in every bookstore and information bureau in the city: it’s just that good.
If I had one tiny complaint, it’s that I’m personally not that fond of the playful, child-like typeface used for the map’s title at the top left – but that’s a pretty minor quibble on the whole of things. Wonderful work, Marc!
For those who are interested, Marc has made PDFs of the map that are available to download for personal, non-commercial use only.
Hamburg, Germany’s line map always strikes me as one of the most ugly maps depicting a major transit network – one can understand if the ones made for small town bus networks are not up to the design standard of the upper echelons like Moscow or the like, but a city like Hamburg having such a bad map is just strange.
The convoluted knot of lines around the main station make it really hard to properly layout the lines and it took me an immense amount of time to make it look halfway decent; the fact that it has two trunk lines does not help.
I added the actual station building with the iconic iron arches and in my opinion, it helps a bit with orientation, especially looking at the “Hbf Nord” and “Hbf Süd” Metro stops that are neither really north or south of the place in real life.
Further additions are, of course, a tiny Elbphilhaarmonie with the corresponding ferry line from Landungsbrücken, walking interchange indications with distance and approximate walking time, overall more harmonic spacing, and many more small things.
Transit Maps says:
There’s a lot of things I really like about this map: the 3D Hauptbahnhof and the way the lines run “through” it is nothing short of inspired, and everything is very neatly and evenly laid out. But there’s one big problem with it that shows what a balancing act a really great transit map really is – if one thing isn’t right, then the whole design can be thrown out of balance.
Simon has employed a distinctive white dash for each station, which in turn needs a background of sufficient darkness for these dashes to show up properly. However, that dark grey background then reduces the contrast between it and the route lines and labels, especially in the darker inner AB tariff zone. The green S1 and teal U4 lines are very recessive against the background, and the cyan label for the Elbphilhaarmonie ferry stop gets swallowed up almost completely. Most of the other colours fare somewhat better – the dark green S11 works much better than the mid-green S1, for example – so the solution could just be adjusting colours to improve the contrast to an acceptable level. It may also be possible to lighten the grey backgrounds just a tad and still use the white station markers, which I do quite like.
A couple of other notes: For me, the canals that join the Alster to the Elbe – while technically correct – are a little too busy and fussy and could perhaps be eliminated, especially as the rest of the river is so clean and stylised. The inclusion of walking distances between nearby stations and landmarks is a welcome addition, though.
Our final word: Contrast between elements is hugely important, and this otherwise excellent map needs a bit of work to improve matters in that department.
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.
