Official Map: Streetcar Network, New Orleans, 2013

February 11, 2013
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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Source: Official NORTA website – link no longer active

Submission – Fantasy Map: United States High Speed Rail System by Albert Twu

February 8, 2013
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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

Hand Drawn-Map of Japanese Rail System by Wyton Chu

February 7, 2013
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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

More Tariff Zone Maps: The Ugly Stepsisters of the Transit Map World

February 6, 2013
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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.

Official Map: Verkehrsverbund Ost-Region Tarifzonenplan, Austria, 2013

February 5, 2013
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Okay, my head is officially reeling here. Try as I might, I can barely make any sense at all of this fare zone map from Austria’s Verkehrsverbund Ost-Region, the transport association that handles rail and bus transit in Eastern Austria (in effect, the Greater Vienna area).

I get that there are eight concentric zone rings radiating out from Vienna, each of which is broken up into smaller zone areas, but after that…

There just seems to be so many exceptions to the zones as to make the system impossible to understand. There are multiple extensions from one zone from another along rail lines, and also the ever-so-helpfully named “Zone Conflicts”, where multiple zones could apply depending on where you’re coming from and where you’re going to (shown by hatching in the colours of all the competing zones).

Add to the that the rather frenetic indication of bus routes (like a big scribble all over the map) and the incredible amount of labelling just about everywhere, and it’s all a bit of a confusing mess to me, unfortunately.

Unless readers from Austria can tell me that they use this map regularly and actually find it useful in their trip planning, I’m going to have to give this one star. Getting around by transit shouldn’t be this obtuse.

Source: Offical VOR website

The Design Process Behind the New Moscow Metro Map

February 4, 2013
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 As you may have heard by now, the Art Lebedev Studio entry will become the new official Moscow Metro map at the end of February. It beat out the other two entries convincingly, garnering 52% of the popular vote.

Of particular interest to me, though, is the design process page for the map on their website: a fascinating look at the hard work and effort that goes into making a world-class transit map. Concepts are tried, refined, discarded and tried again to find the perfect solution. Nothing is taken for granted and everything is evaluated again and again. Note the beautiful underlying grid (shown above) and the guides used for accurately placing station labels perfectly every time (something that the Washington DC Metro map was completely incapable of in its redesign last year.) More than anything, this page shows that good design doesn’t just “happen”: it’s a process that evolves over time according to the needs of the client and the designer’s skills.

The best part of the page? The map halfway down the page where you can scrub through 95 – yes, ninety-five! – different iterations of the map to see how the map evolved over time.

See also this page on Lebedev’s website that details all the features of the final, finished map. Also fascinating!

Unofficial Map: San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit, 2011

February 2, 2013
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This post comes about because of an email from an anonymous follower, who says:

“Any idea if a unified San Francisco transit map exists somewhere out there, perhaps a la the Portland one? SF has to have one of the more confusing transit systems in the country, what with Caltrain + BART + Muni + cable cars + the F line.”

As it happens, there are plenty of unofficial maps showing both just the City of San Francisco and the greater Bay Area.

This one, from calurbanist.com, is definitely one of the best. It shows BART, Muni Metro, the F line, Caltrain, and more. The only rail transit it doesn’t show are the historic cable cars (which surely don’t qualify as rapid transit, anyway) and interstate Amtrak trains, preferring to focus on the Amtrak California Capitol Corridor and San Joaquin services.

Extra handy features include an indication of stations with timed transfers between services and an awesome little diagram of how BART services change quite radically depending on the day of the week.

Technically, the map is extremely well drawn – there’s a lovely clean minimalism to the linework and the colour palette is gorgeous, especially in the background areas.

My one minor complaint is that the colours used to denote Muni Metro and Caltrain are very similar to each other. While the relative thicknesses of their service lines help distinguish them from each other, the services do touch and overlap in a couple of places. This problem seems like it could have been easily solved with a little more thought, but still barely detracts from the sheer quality of this piece.

Our rating: One of my favourite unofficial maps. Four-and-a-half stars.

Source: Calurbanist (newer version of this map)

Fantasy Map: Children’s Library Literary “Transit Map”

February 1, 2013
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This adorable map adorns the walls of the rather lovely Passmore Edwards Centre children’s library in Newton Abbot, England. The names of the “stations” were chosen by local children in a competition.

Source: Devon Libraries/Flickr

Historical Map: Los Angeles Pacific Electric Network, 1925

February 1, 2013
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A beautifully rendered (just look at those lovingly drawn mountain ranges!) old-school map of the famous “Red Car” network at its absolute zenith.

It was pretty much all downhill after this: real estate sales from land that had been opened up by the network (the real money that allowed the rail service to continue to run despite operating losses) began to decline and many rural services were converted to cheaper buses around this date.

In the 1930s, plans for an extensive “Motorway System” around Los Angeles were drawn up. Originally, rail tracks were planned for the median of these new freeways, but were quietly dropped without much protest. The convenient age of the automobile had arrived, and – despite a short renaissance during World War II – the Pacific Electric faded slowly away and ceased passenger operations in the early 1960s.

Compare to this awesome relief map of the same network from 1920 (October 2011, 4.5 stars).

Prints of an almost identical map from 1933 are available at the Transit Maps print store.

Our rating: Lovely early 20th Century cartography. 4 stars.

Video: Making of a London Underground String Map by Dan Coffey

January 31, 2013
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Feeling creative? Why not make a string art replica of your favourite subway system as shown in this awesome video? The pro tip is definitely the taping down of the actual map before putting in the nails for guaranteed fidelity to the real thing.

Source: Dan Coffey/Vimeo