Great photo showing how the LA Metro maps are part of a larger, unified, wayfinding system. Consistency of typography and brand are key – note how the titles of each map are in the same location and typeface every time, as is the Metro logo: colour is the main differentiator of information.
Source: yreese/Flickr
I’m totally loving this series of work by Nick Saltmarsh on Flickr. By zooming right in on details of the Tube Map, he makes us take another look at something that’s so familiar and ubiquitous.
Check out the full set here. Some are more successful than others, but all are interesting… and some make awesome abstract art pieces.
Submitted by Heikki Salko, who says:
You keep mentioning how “there must be something worse out there.” Personally I like to think it will always hold true, but I’d still like to see your opinion on this official map from a small German town. Someone linked to it in a discussion about line numbering/naming systems, but I have to admit I didn’t quite have the courage to try figuring out that much detail…
As a related question, do you ever get the urge to just scribble a new map together in an hour and mail it to a transit agency since it’d still be better than their existing one? I know I do, and I’m hardly a professional.
Transit Maps says:
I think Heikki may have done it, folks. If any map deserves a rating of zero, it’s this one. Technically deficient, confusing to use and hideous to behold: this one’s got it all. And I can see why the route naming conventions were being discussed: here we have the A/B, the B/A, the B1, the C and the C1… clear as mud. Most of these names don’t even fit properly into their little label boxes on the map, making them almost impossible to read as well.
And if you foolishly assumed north was at the top of this map, you’d be wrong. That’s east. Well, kind of. The map is so hopelessly distorted – even for a diagrammatic map – that direction and the relative location of stops is almost totally random.
We also have white bus stops, blue stops and yellow stops, but no explanation of what that means, here or on the website. Some sort of zoning, maybe? Anyone’s guess!
Stop names regularly run into the stop marker, sometimes so badly that you can’t see the entire last letter of the name! The two zones – one for the city of Meiningen, the other for the area around the smaller village of Herpf – are badly drawn: a rough ellipse that clashes with stop labels, and a shonky polygon that’s drawn that way in order to avoid the text and logo at the top left of the map.
Our rating: Absolutely appalling and so at odds with the normal efficient German transit map style. The Deutsche Bahn logo (a German design classic) must be embarrassed to be on a map this bad. I’m going to do it, everyone – for the first time, a map gets a ZERO.
As to Heikki’s second question: All the time! However, it’s a matter of finding the time and prioritising projects for me. I have a full-time job and a two-year old son: “free time” seems to be a dwindling resource for me these days!
Source: Official MBB website
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An anonymous follower asks: “Do you have any examples of a line map for a loop/circle line? I’m curious as to how those are implemented.”
Transit Maps says:
Generally, a strip map for a loop or circle line follows much the same principles as a usual one, although the available space may have to be used a little more creatively in order to fit things in. Above are a few interesting examples.
London’s Circle Line: With recent additions, this line is no longer a true loop – for which the travelling public is sincerely thankful, as any problems on the Circle used to impact the District and Hammersmith & City lines terribly, throwing much of the Underground into chaos. From the picture above, it can be seen that the Circle Line’s strip map utilises a much deeper space above the doors than many Underground strip maps do. Often, they run in a single, shallow line above the windows of the carriage. The other lines that share track with the Circle Line are also shown, but not lines that cross it: these are shown as standard interchanges instead.
Chicago’s Orange Line: This line runs around Chicago’s central Loop and returns back the way it came. The map handles things in a pretty straightforward way, although, interestingly, the thickness of the route line halves while it’s going around the loop. The direction of travel around the loop is clearly indicated with arrows.
Tokyo’s Yamanote Line: Of course, the Japanese use technology to display information about their famous circle line! Each car on the Yamanote Line has LCD displays that indicate the current station (the red box), as well as the estimated time to the next few stations. The display alternates between Japanese and English information.
Glasgow Subway: Well, the whole subway is a loop – earning the system the nickname “The Clockwork Orange” – so all their maps look like this. Despite the inner and outer loops travelling in opposite directions, this map neglects to point out which one goes where!
Image Sources:
Circle Line (stavioni/Flickr)
Chicago Orange Line (Tape/Flickr)
Tokyo Yamanote Line (All in Japan)
Glasgow Subway (Martin Deutsch/Flickr)
Yummy excerpt from the Massimo Vignelli/Unimark 1970 style guide, showing style and dimensions for in-car strip maps, using the “E” line as an example. Look at how everything is defined precisely and consistently: there’s absolutely no room for misinterpretation here.
Want to see more from the manual? Check out this great Flickr photoset.
Source: Blue Pencil
As you should know, official transit maps are copyrighted materials. Commercial reproduction of the map by third parties normally requires permission and payment of a licence fee – often a hefty one.
A lot of people don’t want to pay that fee, so they design their own version of the map instead. This can result in maps that are eerily similar to the official one, nicely designed but different maps, or horrendous monstrosities. Guess which category this map falls into?
June 2023: Image removed at the request of the rights holder, but you can view it on their website here.
Have we been there? Yes. And with the official map (October 2011, 4.5 stars), the Metro is super easy to use.
What we like: At least the lines are the right colours.
What we don’t like: Sooooo ugly. Call-out boxes for every station waste space and look terrible. The worst example is Trinitat Nova station, which has two call-out boxes, one for Lines 3 and 11 and a separate one for Line 4, because the designer couldn’t work out how to have the three different line colours in the background of one call-out box.
Which way is north? Barcelona is actually oriented about halfway between the cardinal points, so giving some sort of directional indication on the Metro map is very important. The official map includes major roads, the coastline and a north pointer to help out: this map gives you nothing at all. What appears to be north here is actually north-east.
The integrated tram system is missing entirely, as there’s simply no room for it to fit. There’s actually a second map on the website for this system, where the main Metro map is tinted back without labels and the tram system is slapped on over the top.
Our rating: Hideous and confusing. I thought long and hard about giving this a zero, but surely there’s still something worse than this out there.
Source: Barcelona Tourist Guide
Brought to my attention by Transit Maps follower, Alex Marshall, this is the latest New Orleans streetcar map, updated after the opening of the new Loyola Avenue line in January of this year.
Have we been there? No. One day!
What we like: Informationally, it does the job, I guess. It shows the routes and connections to other services in a neat, easily understandable way. It’s just so… dull.
What we don’t like: The very best transit maps have a sense of place about them, and one could argue that New Orleans is like no other place on earth. The sheer amount of history represented by the historic streetcars and the unique culture of the city itself should be represented in this map, yet are completely absent. Instead, we’re given a bland, generic map that could be from just about anywhere.
Quickly looking at a geographical map of the network gives me so many ideas, I may just have to whip something up myself. The smooth curve of the St. Charles Line wrapped in the meandering shape of the Mississippi River could be so beautiful if handled well…
Also of note: apparently, the only two points of interest on the entire streetcar network are the Convention Center and NORTA’s own building. I never knew New Orleans could be so exciting.
Our rating: A hugely wasted opportunity to create something as memorable as the Big Easy itself. Competent but extremely dull. Two-and-a-half stars.
Source: Official NORTA website – link no longer active
Submitted by thethingtobomb, who says:
Obviously this potential US High Speed rail system has some layout problems, but the map itself is intriguing. What’s your opinion?
Transit Maps says:
The problem with this map is that it’s based on incredibly optimistic projections of HSR in the United States (I believe the technical term for this is a “pipe dream”). Back in 2009, there was a big push for high-speed rail and it seemed that everyone was getting behind it – hence, all the routes shown here.
Cue the economic downturn and suddenly things don’t look so rosy. HSR is expensive.
Of everything shown here, only the incredibly controversial California High Speed Rail is getting anywhere near construction. If I remember right, Florida explicitly rejected Federal grant money for HSR there, and I know for a fact there’s almost no funding in Oregon.
Of current routes, only the Northeast Corridor is taking baby steps towards becoming a true high-speed corridor: the Acela Express barely qualifies at its highest speed, and there’s plenty of sections of track where it has to operate at slower speeds.
In short, HSR has a long way to go before acceptance and implementation in the United States, meaning maps like this remain strictly in the “fantasy” category.
Design-wise, the map is functional enough, although the font used is pretty ghastly, in my opinion.
Source: Albert Twu
Okay, this is nothing short of amazing.
Drawing a complex transit system map is hard enough, even with computers and the precise drawing/drafting tools they offer. To draw something like this by hand and have it look so clean and accurate beggars belief. Love love love.
Click through to view a whole set of images of this remarkable piece on Flickr.
Source: Flickr/chuwasg
Yesterday’s post on Eastern Austria/Greater Vienna’s tariff zone map certainly attracted some attention: I’ve already received quite a few links to similar maps from different (mainly European) locations. Shown here are the tariff zone maps for Munich, Glasgow and Hamburg, all of which are bewildering in their own way.
As some commenters have pointed out to me, these maps seem to be a bit of a necessary evil: the transit agency needs to have some way of conveying their (often complex) fare structure to commuters, who require this information to buy weekly or monthly passes. The larger the system and the more modes of transportation used, the more complex and unwieldy the map becomes.
Because they’re only used by a subset of the total users of the system, these maps don’t always get the same “design love” that the main system map gets… leaving us with something that’s often visually unsatisfying and arcane in its actual usage. In this digital age, I think that a form on the transit agency’s website linked to a database of destinations would actually be a quicker, more user-friendly way for commuters to obtain this information. Enter your starting point, your destination, choose between alternate routes or services if there’s a choice, and you’re then presented with the cost of your pass, which perhaps you could even purchase on-line.
