Official Map: Public Transport Network of Debrecen, Hungary, 2013

October 9, 2013
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Sent my way via a comment left on the website regarding the woeful map of Szeged, Hungary (Sept. 2013, 0.5 stars), here’s another truly awful transit map from Hungary: this one from its second-largest city, Debrecen.

In short, it’s an absolute disaster.

Route lines branch off in any direction (no constraining angles to 45-degree increments for this bad boy!), while labels are jammed in wherever they can fit, at any old angle. The labelling is so bad, that the map has a large part of the legend at the bottom left devoted to defining abbreviations that are used in an attempt to shorten names to make them fit! At least none of the labels cut through route lines, but the means don’t justify the ends here.

Technically, even the curved parts of the route lines are actually short sections of straight paths that simulate a curve (badly), making me think that this has been put together in CAD software, rather than a design/illustration application.

The strangely subdued colour scheme (a lot of pastel pinks, purples and greys) doesn’t help matters either: there’s very little contrast between a lot of adjacent route lines, which makes following them difficult.

Almost apologetically, the text above the legend states: “Attention! Map not to scale.”

Our rating: An absolute eyesore. This style of map is fairly common for bus/tram networks in Europe, and can work when executed well (see Viteks Bariševs’ unofficial map of Riga, Latvia), but this is definitely not working at all. No stars.

Source: Official DKV site – also an “interactive” Flash-based version of the same map, and an SVG download if you want to open it up in Illustrator for some laughs

Submission – Unofficial Map: Metro and Suburban Rail, Milan by Dmitry Goloub

October 8, 2013
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Submitted by Dmitry, who says:

It all started when in Moscow was initiated a public tender for creation of a new, modern metro map. I was really excited and made an imaginary metro map for Florence (IRL there’s no metro).

But then I thought that I can do something really useful. A map for a real transport system that would be helpful, beautiful and clean.

I have completely redesigned the Milan Metro Map. I have added the latest updates with line M5, a grid with alphabetic list of stations, airports, I have created a new set of pictograms and packed them into a symbol font. I have created a completely new style that does not copy any other transport map in the world.

This map now has its own character, just like the city. The emphasis is put on the M lines however you can clearly understand how to use both M and S lines, how to get from point A to point B. The current official map just shows the S stations, it does not show to which line a station belongs.

I have excluded the regular railways (RFI) because they’re not a metropolitan transport.

Full project information and a PDF is here, free for download.

Transit Maps says:

Wow. This is absolutely beautiful work, and quite superior to the somewhat stuffy official map (March 2012, 3.5 stars).

Dmitry hits the nail on the head when he says this map now has a character that’s unique to the city, and its a look that feels appropriate for fashion-conscious, forward-looking Milan. Everything here is created especially for this map: the lovely custom icons, the square-yet-round station markers, and the stunning ribbon-like effect used for the suburban rail lines, which has a lovely rhythmical flow to it. Even the slight checkerboarding pattern used for the grid (alternating squares are tinted a little darker) – which could look clumsy if not handled well – is handled deftly and subtly.

Our rating: Hand-crafted excellence that suits its target city perfectly. 5 stars.

P.S. Seriously, are Russians the best transit map designers at the moment or what? This beautiful piece, Michael Kvrivishvili’s contest-winning MBTA map and Lebedev Studio’s Moscow Metro redesign. All such beautiful work and something for other designers to aspire to.

Historical Map: Rapid Transit for San Francisco: Monorail Alternative, 1952

October 7, 2013
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Well, thank goodness this never eventuated. Can you imagine an elevated monorail running down the length of Market Street?

From a 1952 San Francisco Public Utilities Commission report entitled Rapid Transit for San Francisco: Monorail, Elevated, Subway? A Report of Possibilities.

Source: Eric Fischer/Flickr

Official Map: Isometric JR West System Map

October 4, 2013
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I’m not sure if I’ve ever been so completely, madly and totally in love with a transit map as I am with this. A giant, sprawling, isometric representation of much of Japan showing JR Group railway lines. The map is produced by the JR West company, and its operating area is shown in full detail within the green area (apart from the heavily urbanised areas around Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe, where – wisely – not all stations are shown). Connecting services and routes operated outside the JR West area are also shown, but in less detail – only major stations along the routes are indicated. Shinkansen lines are light blue, JR West main line routes are dark blue (main line routes outside their operating area match the company that operates in that area – red for JR Kyushu, for example), while urban routes seem to follow their established colour-coding.

As can be seen from the two detail images from the area around Osaka, there’s both an English and Japanese version of the map. The Japanese version is arguably more effective because of the in-built ability to set the text vertically, but the English version isn’t half bad either. I particularly like the way the line names have been set to conform to the isometric grid – a very nice design touch.

Our rating: I like to imagine that this is the world map from some incredible railroad-building computer game. 5 stars!

Source: Official JR West website

Historical Map: Tramways and Trolleybus Routes of Shanghai, 1939

October 3, 2013
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At first glance, this appears to be a basic map outlining tram and trolleybus routes within Shanghai’s International Settlement, dated December 1939. It’s only when you read the legend that you start to realise the greater historical context of this map.

The statement that accompanies the dotted route lines in the legend simply states “No service in operation at present due to circumstances beyond the company’s control” – an massive understatement of the volatile situation in Shanghai at that time.

It’s just two years after the brutal Battle of Shanghai, and the Chinese parts of the city outside the International Settlement and French Concession are fully occupied by invading Japanese forces. Fighting between the Japanese and Chinese revolutionaries often spilled over the (supposedly neutral) settlements’ borders, which probably explains the reluctance of the transit company to guarantee service.

In 1941, the Japanese army entered and occupied the International Settlement in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor – the long-running Sino-Japanese war was now absorbed into the Pacific front of World War II.

Our rating: Not an amazing map of itself, but the history that it hints at is fascinating and deserves to be better known. 5 stars!

Source: Virtual Shanghai website via Taras Grescoe

Detail, Transit Map of Milan, Italy

October 1, 2013
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A detail of a city-wide map showing the approximate limits of the historical centre of Milan. I’m guessing that this is located in or near the Duomo Metro station, based on the way that the map is worn away at that point – as I’ve mentioned before, many users will actually point to their starting location on a map as they trace their intended route.

The thick green/yellow/red lines are the Metro, blue lines are the tram and brown/maroon lines would be buses. Numbers in circles show route termini; numbers in squares allow you to follow a route from point to point.

The area shown here is actually easily walkable without the use of public transport, unless you’re in a hurry, I guess!

Source: benbna/Flickr

Historical Map: San Diego “Park Line” Bus Route Map, June 1978

October 1, 2013
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Looks like tightly-spaced Avant Garde was totally in vogue in 1978 (see also this Portland, Oregon bus map). This is a charmingly naive little map, complete with scratchy pen and ink drawings of points of interest, a lovely ornate north pointer (another 1970s typeface with some great swashes!) and an adorable little green hand pointing at the downtown inset. It even clearly shows all relevant street names and interchanges with other routes. What’s not to love?

Our rating: Charmingly rough around the edges, but does the job well. Three-and-a-half stars.

Source: SDMTS/Flickr

Official Map: Gauteng Metrorail, South Africa, 2013

September 30, 2013
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Submitted by scsj, who says:

Metrorail in Gauteng (Johannesburg/Pretoria/Soweto/Germiston), South Africa. I don’t know, I find this map monumentally confusing. There are way too many colors and none of the lines have names, there’s no scale or anything to indicate location other than station names, it’s so cramped, and it sacrifices too much geographic accuracy for the sake of the design – for example, the offshoot of the dark blue line between Johannesburg Park and Pretoria is actually west of the main part of the line, not east. And why is the spacing mostly uniform everywhere except the Centurion and Midrand Gautrain stations?

The interesting thing is that Gautrain is among the best, most user-friendly transit systems I’ve ever used. I haven’t used Metrorail in Gauteng, but I have used it in Cape Town, and the quality is much lower. Gautrain is aimed at upper and middle class suburbanites whereas Metrorail is aimed at the working class, who by and large commute in from the far-flung townships they were forced into under apartheid.

Transit Maps says:

It’s pretty hard to disagree with this summary: this really is a pretty dismal effort of a map. The most ridiculous part has to be the naming of all eleven route lines in the legend as just “MetroRail Line”, not as destinations or even route colours. Absolutely and astonishingly useless.

The other main problem is the lack of any semblance of geography or scale. This system is huge and sprawling: it covers an area around 150 km tall by 120 km wide (90 x 75 miles), but you’d never know it from this map. As an example, Nasrec station is less than 10 km away from Johannesburg Park Station, and over 60 km from the southernmost station, Vereeniging – yet here they seem almost equidistant. While I understand that this is a diagrammatic representation of the system, some concession to showing the distances a traveller can expect to cover needs to be made.

Colour choices are generally hideous as well: cyan interchange markers clash with almost every line they cross, and we also have retina-searing magenta and yellow “Business Express” markers just to make sure no colour feels left out. 

Finally, absolutely every single station label is set at an angle – and in all four possible 45-degree orientations as well: Erik Spierkermann would have an absolute fit if he ever looked at this map. 

Our rating: Technically, it’s actually drawn quite well – no errors, consistently drawn lines, no-nonsense sans serif typeface (some variant of DIN?) –  but the end result still manages to be quite dire. 1.5 stars.

Source: Official Metrorail website – PDF link

Fantasy Map: Tyneride BRT Network Map

September 30, 2013
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Utterly plausible bus rapid transit (BRT) system map for the Tyneside region of England, designed as if it was a division of the Tyne & Wear Metro.

While I can’t comment on whether Nexus/Metro would ever actually operate its own BRT network, I certainly can’t fault the aesthetics of the map itself. It’s absolutely spot-on, mimicking the look of the official Metro rail map (Nov 2011, 3.5 stars) perfectly. The 30/60-degree angles and the use of the distinctive Calvert slab serif typeface all convince the viewer that this is an official Metro map.

If anything, it’s perhaps a little too similar – the only indication that this is a BRT map as opposed to light rail is the red “B – Buses” symbol at the bottom left, a riff off the iconic yellow “M – Metro” logo.

Our rating: A fun visual homage to a well-known system map, although perhaps a little too close to be successfully adapted to real-world usage if such an event ever occurred. Three stars.

Source: Urbanplanner24/Flickr

Aerial View of Public Transport Routes in Budapest, Hungary

September 27, 2013
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transporteconomics:

This is an aerial view of surface public transport routes in Budapest, Hungary – the idea came from the work of Taylor Gibson posted on Transit Maps.

Following the general convention in Budapest, bus lines are blue, trams are yellow, trolleys are red, and suburban railways are shown in green. As for the direction of the image, the Danube flows approximately from the north (upper right corner) to the south (lower left corner). Elevation is shown with a vertical distortion factor of 2.0.

There are a few notable elements in the picture. First, there are three tram lines that go up the hills in the upper left corner – the middle one is actually a cog-wheel railway, now classified as a tram by BKK, the operator. Second, the two suburban railway lines going southward are not connected: there is about only 500 meter between the two, and while the connection has been planned for many years, there is no timeframe set for the completion. Third, notice that trolleybuses are only running on the Pest side of the city. While there used to be a line in Buda, it was destroyed in the second world war. New lines in Pest were opened in late forties and early fifities, then more were added in the 70’s and 80’s, mostly replacing old tram lines which ran in the narrow streets of Pest.

The extensive night bus system of the city is not shown in this image.

Nice work! The radial nature of transit here is immediately evident, and the lack of trolleybuses on the “Buda” side of the river is fascinating.