Okay, perhaps not the real Kermit – it’s a stuffed toy that’s taken around the world by its owners, but a small green frog navigating the Marunouchi Line is still pretty darn cute.
Source: Kermit the Frog’s Kickass Vacation in 15 Epic Photos/Mashable
So the MBTA is having a friendly little “contest” for people to design a new “T” map, ostensibly in celebration of National Transportation Week. How sweet and fun!
Let’s get real here, people.
This is speculative (“spec”) work, pure and simple. The MBTA wants to harvest ideas for a future map from entries, but doesn’t want to pay a red cent for them. The winner gets nothing but kudos and the “privilege” of having their map displayed on the MBTA website and at the State Transportation Building for an unspecified period of time.
Meanwhile, the MBTA gets it all:
“All submissions shall become the sole property of the MBTA. The MBTA shall own the entire copyright in all submissions selected, in whole or in part, for use in the final map design.
Competitors whose submissions are not selected, in whole or in part, shall grant to the MBTA a worldwide, perpetual, gratis license to reproduce and/or use the submission in any way, in any medium now known or hereafter devised, for any purpose, including but not limited to publication, exhibition and archive of the competition results.
Submissions will not be returned to competitors after the contest and access to the submission will not be allowed at any time. Therefore, it is important that competitors photograph their submissions and/or retain at least a copy of the submission materials. Once received, submissions become the sole property of the MBTA.”
That’s right: the MBTA owns everything, lock, stock and barrel. You, on the other hand – no longer owning the rights to your own hard work – probably can’t even put it in your portfolio.
Simply put, this competition is insulting to designers and cartographers – skilled practitioners of a difficult and complex discipline of design – who deserve their talent to be recognised and rewarded. There are plenty of amazing professionals in America who make their living out of designing maps – good, usable, beautiful maps – all of whom would love to work on this project, and would do an excellent job of it.
As long time readers of this blog know, I’m not a big fan of the current MBTA map, and I’ve already done my own redesign of it, which I’m actually very proud of (seen above and in more detail on my design blog). My map isn’t the perfect square that MBTA design standards require, because I made a conscious decision to show and name all the Green Line stations. Eventually, I was going to get around to making a square version, but not now. Not now that I know the MBTA is looking for free ideas for their map. If the MBTA likes my ideas for their map – and they’ve surely seen enough of my body of work to know that it’s good – then they can bloody well pay me for it.
(For more on spec work and why it’s bad for the design industry, visit nospec.com)
This design is and always will be ©2012 Cameron Booth
My Twitter feed and inbox are both absolutely overflowing with references to this map from the “xkcd’ web comic, so here’s a post about it!
xkcd has always been a comic for geeks, and has a long history of awesome map-related work – my favourites include this Lord of the Rings movie narrative map, and the particularly carto-nerdy discussion of map projections – so it’s nice to see the strip’s attention turn to this particular facet of cartography. Randall Munroe’s typically wry sense of humour can be seen in a lot of the labels on the map: “graveyard for passengers killed by closing doors”, the “Green Line extension to Canada” from Boston, and the inclusion of the infamous Springfield Monorail from The Simpsons. It’s definitely worth exploring in great detail – my favourite is probably the inclusion of the idiosyncratic and once-futuristic Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit system at West Virginia University as the connection between Washington, DC and Atlanta.
A lot of people are already having issues with Randall’s definition of a “subway”, which he defines thusly:
For the pedantic rail enthusiasts, the definition of a subway used here is, with some caveats, “a network containing high capacity grade-separated passenger rail transit lines which run frequently, serve an urban core, and are underground or elevated for at least part of their downtown route.” For the rest of you, the definition is “an underground train in a city.”
If we’re going to be pedantic, then there are some strange omissions – Seattle’s Central Link light rail (grade-separated, frequent, serves the city and runs underground through the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel) just off the top of my head. I feel sure many people could think of others!
What the map does show well, even in its cartoon-like execution, is the complete dominance of New York’s subway system (the mouseover tooltip for the comic states that about one in three North American subway stops are in NYC). Randall has remained quite faithful to the actual official system maps for each component city, so New York ends up taking up a huge portion of the map.
But, despite the undeniable brilliance of this map, I know I’ve seen very similar pieces before this. This more serious map of almost exactly the same thing was featured on the Beyond DC blog last month, and this awesome piece by Bill Rankin from 2006 which shows all North American metro systems (a far more inclusive phrase than “subway systems”) at the same scale is also highly reminiscent of this piece. In the end though, it’s infused with enough wacky “xkcd-ness” to make it take on a life of its own.
Source: xkcd
Here’s an amazing full page ad that ran in The Oregonian on Thursday, February 23, 1950 to announce the end of an era in Portland. The last few remaining streetcar lines – to Council Crest, Willamette Heights and 23rd Avenue – were going to be replaced by “the very latest design in city transit equipment”, modern motor coaches. It’s interesting to compare the bulky, inefficient buses depicted here with their modern equivalents, especially in light of the glowing copy in the ad:
“The finest in heating and air conditioning … extra large windows for better natural light … increased electric lights … comfortable seating with deep upholstery … low entrance and exit steps”.
The ad also includes a number of surprisingly clear and attractive downtown routing maps for the most popular lines, many of which were subject to change because of the then-new system of one-way streets that was being introduced at the same time as the equipment change. The ad also exhorts the reader to contact the Portland Traction Company (PTC) Dispatcher if “route and schedule folders are desired” – we’re a long way from real-time arrivals information on our smartphones here!
Click through to Flickr to view the ad at a size where you can (just) read the type. Also, compare with this handsome map of PTC services from 1943 (April 2012, 4 stars) – all the streetcar routes shown on that map (the yellow route lines) have disappeared just seven years later.
Source: pdxcityscape/Flickr
I found out about this awesome map from a tweet from Vanshnookenraggen (otherwise known as Andrew Lynch) just the other day.
Originally, I was just going to post the black and white map from the 1920 New York Times article that the original blog post references, but then I realised that the image on the blog linked to a super high resolution PDF of the map. As I found the map in the newspaper article a bit difficult to decipher (lots and lots of intersecting black lines!), I decided to colour it up in Photoshop myself, just to make everything a bit easier to see and understand.
Not everything is perfect: the source material looks like it’s been (understandably) scanned from an actual copy of the newspaper, so a lot of finer detail has been lost. It looks like some of the proposed lines are actually improvements of the existing track and really should be a thick red line superimposed on a thin black line (look closely, and you can see that some red dashed lines are joined together by a thinner line). However, especially in the tangled web of downtown Manhattan, I really couldn’t make things out, so all thicker lines are red.
The map itself details the almost outrageous plans for expansion that the New York Subway had way back in 1920 – everything you see in red was planned to be built in the next twenty-five years (by 1945!). Of course, not everything seen here has come to fruition, but you can’t accuse the planners of not thinking big!
Submitted by themallefitz, who says:
This is a transit map of the Hamburger Hochbahn (subway/elevated railway) from 1915. it was painted on the ceiling of the wagons.
Transit Maps says:
This. Is. So. Beautiful.
Really?
After all this time running this blog, only now do I find out that the incredible isometric Stuttgart U- and S-Bahn map (October 2011, 5 stars) has an S-Bahn-only sibling?
If anything, this is actually even better than that map: fewer route lines leads to more graphical simplicity. Like that map, however, it’s since been replaced with something disappointingly normal.
Source: shelbycearley/Flickr
Originally sent to me as a photo by long-time reader and contributor, Sam Gold, I thought this map was interesting enough for a full review. It shows all the passenger rail services in Israel, which are divided into nine operational routes, plus a night route than runs the length of the main north-south trunk line.
Have we been there? No.
What we like: Clear coding of the routes in attractive colours. The night service is handled deftly, with a distinct visual difference between it and the regular routes. The bilingual labeling is mostly nicely done, although a couple of stations at the southern end of the “Red Line” have their Roman script left-aligned when right-aligned would be more appropriate.
What we don’t like: The whole map feels a little disjointed to me. In a diagrammatic map like this, the main north-south trunk line from Nahariyya to Be’er Sheva really could be turned into a straight line – a strong visual axis that underpins everything else. Instead, it weaves uncertainly all over the place, leading to some awkward spacing between route lines and other elements
Stations that are recommended as interchanges have a bar linking all the lines, while other stations that serve multiple lines just have unconnected dots. I’d prefer to see them linked with a thin black line, just so it’s obvious that all the dots collectively belong to one station.
Although this is a diagrammatic map, the scale of some elements is very odd. Stations in Tel Aviv, which have to span across seven lines (plus the night line at Savidor Center), seem to take up half the width of the country, while the “Brown Line” from Be’er Sheva – North to Dimona – which is actually a 40-kilometre (25 mile) journey, appears to be a tiny shuttle trip, as its route line is only just longer than the distance shown between Be’er Sheva – North and Be’er Sheva – Central: a real-life distance of just over a kilometre!
Our rating: Serviceable enough, but visually, a whole lot more could be made of the main north-south trunk. Two stars.
Source: Official Israel Railways website
Here’s a photo taken in 2011 of a fantastic old and faded sign at the Readville MBTA station in Massachusetts.
As the original poster on Flickr points out, trains no longer run from Readville to Attleboro along the Providence/Stoughton Line: trains on that line pass through Readville without stopping. Of course, the fact that the sign refers to the last outbound station as “Attleboro” is an anachronism within an anachronism, as the map shows Providence, Rhode Island to be the last station.
It seems pretty clear to me that the signage is a remnant on the old platforms that were used for Providence/Stoughton service up until 1987. I’d say the map is from late 1986, a date backed up by the fact that the Fitchburg Line is shown as extending through to Gardner, a station that closed on January 1st, 1987.
Anyone know if the map is still in place?
Source: t55z/Flickr
As Seattle continues with its expansion of light rail (East Link, University Link) and streetcar (Capitol Hill streetcar), here’s a look back at the city 99 years ago. This isn’t a transit map per se – rather, it’s a map of the city that also happens to show the transit network in no uncertain terms. The thick dark lines that traverse the city like veins are all streetcars, cable cars and interurban trains. Main line trains are shown by more conventional “railway line” ticked strokes – these travel to King Street Station (still in use by Amtrak and Sounder trains today) and the adjacent Union Station, which now houses the offices for Sound Transit. View a full-size version of the map here.
Source: Rob Ketcherside/Flickr
