Although it seems as though at least one person thought it was…
Source: Dave Gorman/Flickr
Photo: This Is Not A Tube Map!
Unofficial Map: Toilet Map for Stockholm Metro Travellers by Pruek Lawchaiyapruek, 2013
A light-hearted and off-beat map/infographic for you today – one that shows the distance, type and cost of public toilets near metro stations in Stockholm, Sweden. Hopefully, the map was not borne out of Pruek’s inability to find a facility when in dire need!
The graphic is nicely put together, and functions well as both a (simple) transit map and an informational graphic. It has one of the nicest examples of “candy-striping” the route lines that I’ve seen in a while where the Red and Green lines share track. I’m not normally a big fan of this approach, but it works very nicely here.
The use of line length and colour-coding to denote distance to the toilet of your choice is really nice, giving two visual indicators for this very important piece of information. The one thing I’m pretty certain the graphic doesn’t do is indicate which direction to go to find the toilet, which could be a problem for people unfamiliar with the area who really, really need to go! Maybe a small arrow pointing the way could work, although that might be hard to integrate with such a schematic diagram. There’s certainly plenty of white space in the graphic to work on a solution.
The icons for each type of facility are nicely done, and the price indicator (open, half-filled and filled circles for each price point) is very intuitive. I’m not entirely sure I agree with the decision to flip the icons vertically when they’re under a distance line: it looks a little strange to me.
And is it just me, or does the second icon for a “stand alone toilet” look like a dead ringer for the TARDIS?
Source: Pruek’s portfolio website – link no longer active
Infographic: Circle Loop Lines of the World by Matthew Lew
Very aesthetically appealing infographic that compares 18 circle railway lines from around the world. The top part of the graphic displays the lines in a schematic fashion, representing each by its average diameter. The stations that comprise each line are then simply spaced evenly around the circumference to create a very striking pattern. Stations that interchange with other lines are represented by placing a small white dot in the centre of a station’s marker.
Below, information about each line – the number of stations, number of interchanges with other lines, the line’s length and radius, etc. – is displayed, along with a list of all the stations that make up each line. The colour-coding of the lines is designed to create a pleasing visual effect –working its way in order through the colour spectrum – rather than using each line’s “traditional” colour from their respective maps. While this is an understandable design choice, it’s still a little weird to see London’s Circle Line represented by a lovely shade of lime green.
For those who can’t quite make it out, the Circle lines represented (in ascending order of diameter) are:
- Miami, Florida
- Charleroi, Belgium
- Detroit, Michigan
- Glasgow, Scotland
- Oslo, Norway
- Moscow, Russia
- Osaka, Japan
- Madrid, Spain (Line 6);
- London, England (technically a spiral now, rather than a true loop)
- Nagoya, Japan
- Beijing, China (Line 2)
- Shanghai, China
- Tokyo, Japan
- Delhi, India
- Berlin, Germany
- Madrid, Spain (Line 12 – MetroSur)
- Seoul, South Korea
- Beijing, China (Line 10)
Overall, this graphic looks great and provides an interesting, easily digestible, comparison between all these loop railroads. It would be interesting to see a version that plotted the actual routes and stations accurately against each other, rather than this heavily stylised view.
Source: Matthew Lew’s Behance portfolio
High-Resolution Scan of 1988 Amsterdam Transit Map!
Have I ever mentioned how much I love my readers?
I posted about this map last Monday, praising its visual clarity, but also lamenting the fact that I didn’t have a higher resolution version of it to really savour the details.
Almost immediately, I got a submission from Alain Lemaire, who generously sent me full high-resolution scans of the whole map from his personal collection. He provided me with four separate scans, one for each quadrant of the map (which is obviously too big to scan in one piece), which I have simply combined them into one big file (4325 × 4653px, 6MB) in Photoshop – click on the image above to view it.
Alain has this to say about the map:
In my opinion, this map is a diagrammatic beauty, but pretty much rendered useless outside the city center because of the lack of bus stop labels and a geographic backdrop. Might have been the reason why GVB decided to drop this beauty and put the current – rather bland but more practical – design in place which does not feature any stop labels at all but does have a clear geographic backdrop. That way at least you do have a reference point for using the map. Maybe Hans van der Kooi could tell you more about the history and eventual decommissioning of this map.
As far as the colour coding goes, Van der Kooi used colour and line width to show which lines go where: thick red for all tram and thin red for all bus lines to the central station and main transit hub in Amsterdam, thick green for trams on the inner ring route along the city center, thick yellow for ‘other’ tram routes and thin yellow, green, blue and purple for all other bus routes. It seems to me he used yellow for most lines terminating at Sloterdijk station, which served as a second transit hub in the late 1980s. All regional bus lines are shown in black and white. For comparison: the current official map uses colour only to distinguish between tram, bus, peak bus and regional bus. Not of much use if you want to easily determine where your line is heading.
Source: Alain Lemaire via email
Historical Map: New Orleans Streetcar Trackage Map, 1945
A neat little map from the July, 1945 edition of the Electric Railroader’s Association’s Headlights magazine – both the association and the publication are still going strong today.
The map shows all the tracks in the Big Easy at the time, including those that were in usable condition but not currently utilised (indicated by a hash across the track). Routes are indicated by letters that were keyed to the text of the original article – “A” is the “Canal-Cemeteries” route, for example.
The editor of the web page where I found this map provides the following notes:
“There are some small problems with this map, but overall, the details are accurate. Unfortunately, [the artist] did not sketch the trackage of the Napoleon Yard, at the foot of Napoleon Ave. on the southeast corner of Tchoupitoulas St. Also, at Canal St., Royal and Bourbon Streets (Bourbon is not labelled) should be shown in line with St. Charles and Carondelet Streets, respectively. A four-track crossover should be shown in the block of Canal St. between Carondelet and St. Charles.”
Source: New Orleans in 1945, ed. J. George Friedman, Jr.
Design Resource: Transport for London’s “Line Diagram Standards” Guide
Definitely worth a look to see how a major transit agency puts together a comprehensive guide to assembling consistently designed maps. The guide deals with horizontal in-car strip maps and the vertical line maps seen on platforms, but many of the principles still hold true for the design of a full transit map.
Of particular interest is the relationship between the x-height of Johnston Sans and the thickness of the route lines (they’re the same). This value of “x” is also used to calculate the radius of a curve in a route line: the innermost edge of a curve is always three times the value of “x” – never any less. Almost every relationship between objects on the map is defined mathematically, although the nomenclature can be a little less than intuitive sometimes: “x”, “n” and “CH” all make an appearance!
Also, if you ever wanted to know what the PANTONE or CMYK breakdowns for all the Underground route line colours are, this guide tells you that, too!
All in all, a really interesting read – just try and ignore the terrible typos that pop up here and there: “donated” instead of “denoted” on page 11 is my favourite! Click the link below to download the PDF.
Source: Transport for London website – 2MB PDF
Tutorial: Creating Multiple Parallel Route Lines
Today’s tutorial comes from an anonymous question that I received in my inbox, which asked:
I design a bus transit map using a street layer. But how can i align correctly multiple lines on a street without overlap?
This is a great question. You’d be amazed how often I see people attempting to draw multiple parallel route lines manually, which is absolutely the most difficult way of doing things. You might be able to get away with it on a rectilinear transit map, but it’s almost impossible to get right when your route lines are overlaid on a standard road map – there are always curves and twists in the road that make it nigh-on impossible to manually draw adjacent route lines without things looking terrible.
For an example of a very poor attempt at drawing parallel route lines individually, you need look no further than the light rail map for Denver, Colorado (April 2013, 2 stars).
The most frustrating thing about seeing it done the wrong way is that there’s a tool in Adobe Illustrator that makes this task almost effortless.
Object Menu > Path > Offset Path…
The images above demonstrate how to offset route lines correctly – the first image shows how it’s done with an odd number of route lines; the second illustrates how to do it for an even number of route lines.
If you’ve drawn the street layer on your map yourself, then you’ve probably already got the first thing you need – a path that follows the centre of your street. Copy it and then Paste in Front (Cmd/Ctrl-F) so it sits exactly on top of the original. Then move it to its own layer above the street layer and stroke it the way you want your route lines to look. In my example, we’ve got an 8-point wide red route line.
If you’re drawing your route lines on top of an aerial photo or Google Maps image, then you’re going to have to draw your own central route line. Be as accurate as possible while also using as few bezier points as you can. Again, put it on its own layer and make it look the way you want. Now the fun starts.
IF YOU NEED THREE ADJACENT ROUTE LINES (First image), then you’re going to use the central route line you already have, and use the Offset Path function to create a new route line on both sides at once. Select the path, then invoke the Offset Path command. In the resultant dialog box, enter the amount of offset you want, which is the desired distance between the paths. Here, I want a little gap to show between my 8-point route lines, so I entered 10 points. The middle part of the first image shows the results: Illustrator will offset your path to both sides of the line, so it’s basically done all the hard work for us. Now you just need to use the Scissor tool © to cut and then delete the pesky little joining lines that are created at the top and bottom (circled in blue in the image). From there, simply colour the route lines as required. If you need five, or seven, or more route lines, simply keep offsetting the outermost route lines by 10 points and then cutting the resulting new lines to only keep the outermost section each time.
IF YOU NEED TWO ADJACENT ROUTE LINES (Second Image), the process is almost the same, except that when you select and offset the original path, you only use half the required distance between route lines (in my example, 5 points). Then you can delete the original route line, keeping only the new offset paths, which now sit neatly on either side of the centre of the road. To create four, or six, or more route lines, continue to offset the outermost paths by 10 points as in the first example.
Submission – Historical Map: Public Transit in Amsterdam, 1988 by Hans van der Kooi
Submitted by the designer of the map, Hans van der Kooi, who says:
As a result of the popularity of the hand-out map for trams (June 2013, 4.5 stars) in Amsterdam, we designed a larger scale map, used on the tram and bus stops in Amsterdam, including the line of the buses as well. Designed and used in 1988.
Transit Maps says:
It’s an absolute pleasure to have this map submitted by the original designer! While the image size is a little small to make out the fine detail, it’s obvious that this map builds on and continues the good work of the tram network map that I’ve featured previously. Again, the dodecalinear layout suits Amsterdam’s underlying structure almost perfectly, and the way that the thickness of the tram route lines instantly denotes service frequency is quite superb.
Buses are shown with thinner lines and (what looks like) lighter colours. Enough geographical information – parks, bodies of water, major roads, etc. – is included to orient users and make the bus routes useful to use.
The Metro is shown with a dashed blue line: again, the route line doubles in thickness when the two separate lines from Gaasperpas and Gein merge together in the south-eastern corner of the map. National rail services are shown as a dashed black and white line, the way they often are on Dutch transit maps. Note that even in this small image, it’s still very easy to distinguish between the different modes of transit shown – definitely something to aspire to!
Our rating: The image is a little too small to give this a proper rating, but even at a distance, the clarity of the informational design is something to behold.
Source: 8-13 website via Hans van der Kooi
Submission – New Official Moscow Metro In-Car Strip Map
Submitted by long-time contributor, Dmitry Darsavilidze, here’s a brand new strip map for Metro Line 6. Designed by Art.Lebedev Studios, and based on their contest-winning system map, this carries on the good work of that design.
The strip map is simple and uncluttered, and has nice, large, easy-to-read type (a failing of many strip maps, which often have type to small to be easily read from any sort of distance). Information is presented consistently – interchange information is always given underneath the line, making it easy to locate each and every time.
My favourite part, however, is the subtle ring that denotes the Koltsevaya (Circle) Line. Given the Koltsevaya Line’s importance in the system (almost every other line interchanges with it at least once) and the way that it represents the border between central Moscow and the outlying suburbs, using it as a visual device like this is very clever.
Source: Dimitry’s Twitter
Unofficial Map: Washington DC Metro Map by Peter Dovak
An interesting approach to an alternative DC Metro map by Peter Dovak, who previously submitted this fantasy light rail map of Louisville, Kentucky.
There’s quite a bit to like here: I love the circular abstraction of the beltway highway around DC, which is then centred perfactly around the District diamond. Peter’s even made sure that the “square” formed by the three main interchange stations – Metro Center, Gallery Place and L’Enfant Plaza – sits at the exact centre of the diamond/circle, which is a nice design touch. He’s also worked hard to ensure that stations retain their correct position relative to all the boundaries (be they roadway or jurisdictional), which isn’t an easy thing to do.
Less successful, I feel, is the use of 30/60 degree angles for the route lines. While it gives more flexibility in layout, it just ends up looking a little too chaotic when overlaid on the 45-degree angles of the District boundary. Like it or not, this diamond is the shape that defines the District (and the map!): too many angles fights against that shape and dilutes its visual strength. The naturalistic approach taken to the rivers and parkland also creates even more angles that pull the eye different directions. The least successful result of this approach to route lines is the nasty acute angle formed on the southern branch of the Green Line as it turns to follow the District border through the Southern Avenue station.
I like the idea behind the station symbols acting as “ticks” pointing towards their labels, but I feel the white rounded rectangle needs to be brought in from the edge of the “non-tick” side just a little bit. The way it sits right on the edge of the route line at the moment breaks up the flow of the lines and could also cause some problems when printing the map.
Peter’s used the “subtitle” approach to station names that first appeared in a couple of the entries to the Greater Greater Washington map contest and has since migrated to the official map – a fantastic concept, and definitely the right approach. However, he’s also deleted parts of names in certain cases: U Street has lost its “African American Civil War Memorial/Cardozo” subtitle completely. While this definitely saves space and helps labels fit, it’s a huge no-no. Lobby groups have worked hard to give stations those ridiculously long names, and they’re not going to like it if you remove them!
While on the subject of labels, Peter always spells out “Street” and “Road” in station names, but uses “Ave”, “Blvd” or “Sq”. I’d prefer either all spelled out or all abbreviated, not a combination of both.
In the end, this is an interesting alternate take on the DC Metro map. Some ideas work really well, others less so, but the thought processes behind them are valid and considered. For me, this map is a step up in both concept and execution from Peter’s Louisville map.
Source: Peter’s Behance profile