The Sofia Metro is a not-so-big metro system in the capital of Bulgaria. Although I’m not Bulgarian, nor live in Bulgaria, I’ve been there, and it’s quite nice. The following map is the latest one, from the opening of Line 3, on the 26th of August, this year. It’s quite simple, but unlike the previous ones, it’s far more consistent (as it uses the same angles, colors, stuff like that), and much more visually appealing. Any thoughts?
Transit Maps says:
Yes, this is a vast improvement over older Sofia Metro maps! To me, it looks like an evolution in design from the quasi-official version created and promoted by the Spazi Sofia NGO back in 2015 (review here – Cam). It uses the same icons for the points of interest, which suggests a shared parentage.
Overall, I quite like it, though some of the labelling is carelessly placed. The long leader line down to Ovcha Kupel II station is unnecessary, and quite a few names cut across route lines. The long station names and bilingual labels don’t help matters, but I feel that more care could perhaps have been taken.
The other main point of contention is the grey background to indicate the boundaries of the city – I feel that this is redundant and just makes the background busier than it needs to be. However, if it was removed, I guess the question of whether to continue to include the parkland areas would have to be addressed.
Our final word: A solid evolution of the work done by Spazi Sofia, now made fully official, it seems. There’s nothing truly outstanding about it, but it’s clean, simple and pleasing to the eye. 3 stars.
I thought you might enjoy poring over a transit+points of interest map I recently drew of Center City Philadelphia.
I’ve collected bird’s eye urban panoramas since I was a child, and I particularly enjoy panoramas that have placemaking and wayfinding value, such as those drawn by Jenni Sparks and other artists.
I also find there’s no better way to learn and demystify seemingly-complex bus service than drawing it a couple times over. Taking the lead from SEPTA’s own frequency map, here I attempted to demystify bus service for visitors by employing SEPTA’s new color-coded frequency classification, and by winnowing a selection of bus routes that permit the easiest gridlike travel across Center City so visitors aren’t forced to rely only on the spartan axes of the MFL and BSL.
The map was also fueled by a longing and impatience for the points of interest to reopen so that all the attractions of Center City (and other cities) can once again be enjoyed after COVID. Here’s to a better 2021 and 2022 and to the hopeful revival of the urban flaneur!
Zoom and pan the map in the window above, or use the full-screen button to view the map in full detail. If the button doesn’t work for you or you’re on a mobile device, use this link for a full browser window version.
Transit Maps says:
It’s a sign of just how much I love this that I asked Marc whether I could share it in my new zoomable map format, just so you can all get in super close and see the wonderful detail in this map. I just adore the stylised, textured base map – an aerial image run through some artistic Photoshop filters that’s then been cleaned up manually and tinted to highlight points of interest and parkland, which sounds like a lot of painstaking, time consuming work. The end result is worth it, though – the city looks like a city, with recognisable buildings and landmarks. I particularly like the way that taller buildings obscure transit lines on streets that are further away from our viewpoint – it’s this that really sells the dimensionality of the map, like we were in a hot air balloon tethered high above the streets below. It’s very definitely evocative of those old birds-eye view maps that Marc mentions with such fondness.
Marc’s other influence, Jenni Sparks, can certainly be seen in the juxtaposition of a detailed base map and bright, thick transit route lines, though Marc’s map is less chaotic than Jenni’s more organic illustrative pieces. Despite the busy background, all the transit lines stand out well and are easy to see and follow. I particularly like the way that Marc has added texture to the route lines so that they look like they belong to the rest of the map instead of just being plopped on top of it. If all this work wasn’t enough, Marc has also added some 245 points of interest to the map, making it an invaluable tool for visitors to the city. And really, that’s what this map should be for – printed and available for tourists in every bookstore and information bureau in the city: it’s just that good.
If I had one tiny complaint, it’s that I’m personally not that fond of the playful, child-like typeface used for the map’s title at the top left – but that’s a pretty minor quibble on the whole of things. Wonderful work, Marc!
For those who are interested, Marc has made PDFs of the map that are available to download for personal, non-commercial use only.
Hamburg, Germany’s line map always strikes me as one of the most ugly maps depicting a major transit network – one can understand if the ones made for small town bus networks are not up to the design standard of the upper echelons like Moscow or the like, but a city like Hamburg having such a bad map is just strange.
The convoluted knot of lines around the main station make it really hard to properly layout the lines and it took me an immense amount of time to make it look halfway decent; the fact that it has two trunk lines does not help.
I added the actual station building with the iconic iron arches and in my opinion, it helps a bit with orientation, especially looking at the “Hbf Nord” and “Hbf Süd” Metro stops that are neither really north or south of the place in real life.
Further additions are, of course, a tiny Elbphilhaarmonie with the corresponding ferry line from Landungsbrücken, walking interchange indications with distance and approximate walking time, overall more harmonic spacing, and many more small things.
Transit Maps says:
There’s a lot of things I really like about this map: the 3D Hauptbahnhof and the way the lines run “through” it is nothing short of inspired, and everything is very neatly and evenly laid out. But there’s one big problem with it that shows what a balancing act a really great transit map really is – if one thing isn’t right, then the whole design can be thrown out of balance.
Simon has employed a distinctive white dash for each station, which in turn needs a background of sufficient darkness for these dashes to show up properly. However, that dark grey background then reduces the contrast between it and the route lines and labels, especially in the darker inner AB tariff zone. The green S1 and teal U4 lines are very recessive against the background, and the cyan label for the Elbphilhaarmonie ferry stop gets swallowed up almost completely. Most of the other colours fare somewhat better – the dark green S11 works much better than the mid-green S1, for example – so the solution could just be adjusting colours to improve the contrast to an acceptable level. It may also be possible to lighten the grey backgrounds just a tad and still use the white station markers, which I do quite like.
A couple of other notes: For me, the canals that join the Alster to the Elbe – while technically correct – are a little too busy and fussy and could perhaps be eliminated, especially as the rest of the river is so clean and stylised. The inclusion of walking distances between nearby stations and landmarks is a welcome addition, though.
Our final word: Contrast between elements is hugely important, and this otherwise excellent map needs a bit of work to improve matters in that department.
Finally! A comprehensive reworking and redrawing of one of my original projects – a diagram of the European International E-Road network. First drawn back in 2010, It’s a piece that’s always had a place in my heart, but I’ve always put off updating or reworking it over the years because I was just never quite sure how to bring anything new to the table.
However, the recent successful revision of my Interstate Highways as Subway Diagram convinced me that I could use that design language to reinvigorate this old project – and I think it’s definitely been successful! View the map in the window below – you can zoom in and out, pan around, and also go full screen. Or, you can also click here to experience the map in a full browser window.
First things first: this is unapologetically a diagram, not a map. The whole idea here was to fit as much of the network legibly into a square canvas as I could, which means that Eastern Europe and Russia get compressed horizontally – a lot. The Black Sea becomes taller than it is wide, and Turkey gets reduced to a fraction of its actual width. A comparison to the official United Nations map of the network (below) drives home just how large and empty the eastern part of the map would be without this compression (and how cramped Western Europe would be in comparison!), so I think some distortion is a fair price to pay.
A sidenote for those wondering how colours are assigned to the routes. The UNECE document that defines the network defines roads with numbers divisible by 5 (E-5, E-10, E-15, etc.) as “main roads”. These are generally the longest, and help define the shape of the overall network. These roads have been given bright, subway map-like colours in order to reflect their relative importance. All other routes are “intermediate roads”, and are given a subsidiary grey colour. Even-numbered routes (generally running east-west) are slightly darker than odd-numbered routes in order to tell them apart.
Looking back on the original map, there were definitely a few areas that I concentrated on for improvement this time around.
First, I designed the diagram to fit a specific canvas. Back in 2010, I just drew until I was done, and then added the final dimensions at the end to suit what I’d drawn. And it shows: there’s a big empty area of ocean to the left, and the whole thing just feels a bit unbalanced. This time around, I purposefully set out to make the diagram fit into a square canvas – and at the end, it fitted exactly as I had planned: no rescaling of elements or moving things around to make it fit. You can’t ask for better than that!
Secondly, I worked much harder at spacing elements more evenly across the whole map to miminise large empty areas. The same underlying 96-point grid that I used on my Interstates diagram informed a lot of my decisions here, which definitely gives more visual rhythm to the composition. Reducing Scandinavia’s overall size helped a lot, as it visually dominated the old version; as did moving Moscow further north (to somewhere approximating its spatially correct place).
Next: typography. The 2010 version used the ubiquitous and oh-so-dull Myriad Pro Condensed, simply because it was pretty much the only typeface I had at the time that was a) condensed enough to work on the map, and b) had a full range of characters to support the Eastern European and Turkish place names on the map. Now, just as my new Interstates diagram employs the official U.S. highway roadsign typeface “Interstate”, the new E-Roads diagram uses TERN – a typeface family developed by Erik Spiekermann for use on highway roadsigns in Europe. So far, it’s only been adopted in Austria and Slovakia, but it’s still a very appropriate choice for a diagram of European highways! Erik actually sent me this font family in return for a PDF of the original version of this diagram back in 2010, so I’m thrilled to be finally using it in this update! Comparatively, the labels are also set quite a bit bigger now, something I’m very happy about.
Because everything was fitting into place so well, I wanted to see if I could include secondary labels for place names if that country used a different alphabet – and that’s where I ran into some problems. While TERN supports Greek characters and has a wide range of diacritics, it doesn’t go any further east – no Cyrillic, and certainly no Georgian, Armenian, etc. In the end, I set most of these secondary labels in Fira Sans Compressed – it’s not an identical match, but as it’s also a Spiekermann-designed typeface, it bears many of the same design hallmarks and does the job pretty well. Some hunting around on the Internet revealed some appropriate fonts for the few labels that had to be set in more esoteric character sets. All these secondary place names have all just been pasted in from the relevant Wikipedia entries, so I hope there’s no errors (please tell me if there are!). Secondary names are also included in Gaelic for Ireland and Scotland, and in Welsh for Wales – just for fun. I did toy with the idea of showing the “alternate” names for cities in Belgium – the French names in Flanders, and the Dutch names in Wallonia – but that just seemed too fussy in the end.
Other improvements: I massively simplified the coastline this time around to be more in-keeping with the idea that this is a simplified diagram. There were definitely parts with way too much detail before! With one exception*, islands only appear if they have cities connected to the network on them – so no Balearic Islands or Cyprus or Isle of Man or random islands in the fjords of Norway. I’ve also made the visual distinction between routes across water that are actually served by a ferry line (a thicker line), and those that are just hypothetical joining lines between two otherwise disconnected points along a given route (thinner lines). I imagine that some of these could change in the future: until fairly recently, you could catch a ferry from Odesa, Ukraine to Samsun, Turkey across the Black Sea, but not at this moment in time.
One thing I wasn’t expecting at first was new extensions to some of the routes! E-16 used to run from Londonderry/Doire to Oslo, but now it runs all the the way across the Scandinavian peninsula to end at Gävle in Sweden. E-45 has been extended north from Karesuando in Sweden to pass through Finland and end at Alta, Norway. And finally, E-66 now completes something of a bypass of Budapest, running east and north of its old terminus at Székesfehérvár to now end at Szolnok. I was able to incorporate all of these amendments with a minimum of fuss, and I also double-checked and refined the intermediate routing of some roads for better accuracy than the previous version. I noticed that Google and Bing Maps have decided to extend E-86 into Albania from Greece, but I can’t find any official documentation of this change – its western terminus remains as Krystallopigi for now.
As always, your thoughts, comments and corrections are welcome! What do you think of the new interactive presentation of the diagram? Let me know in the comments below!
Note: * The one exception is the Isle of Wight, because the dent in the south coast of England up to Southampton (the Solent) just looked silly without it.
Ever since I first created it in 2009, my Interstates as Subway Map diagram has been one of my most popular and enduring designs. It’s consistently the best selling print in the Transit Maps store, and is something I’m incredibly proud of. However, the last major redesign of it was way back in 2011, and it’s definitely starting to show its age.
At the time, I really didn’t think I’d still be maintaining and updating it nine years down the road, so little thought was put into future-proofing the diagram – it simply reflected the network as it appeared in 2011. This meant that any addition to the Interstate system over the years has had to be shoehorned into a design that wasn’t really ever meant to accommodate it. I think I’ve done a pretty good job to keep the diagram up-to-date and looking good over the years, but I’ve decided that it’s time to completely re-evaluate and redraw the diagram from the top down.
So, without further ado, here’s the revised 2020 version of the diagram as a pannable, zoomable map (or click on this link to view it in a full browser window).
I’ve definitely done my research this time around. Within reason, all known future expansions of the network have been taken into account and shown on the diagram as cased lines. For the first time, I-69 and all its branches in Texas (I-69C, I-69-E and I-69W) are shown in their entirety. All the little gaps in I-49 are accounted for, as is the future extension from Lafayette to New Orleans. Future I-11 is shown from Las Vegas down to Nogales, but the proposed section from Las Vegas up to I-80 is not – there are still too many alternatives on the table for it to be shown with any certainty. Other routes that are barely more than rumour (I-3, for example) are also omitted, though I’m confident that this new design can handle them if and when they become reality.
Make the design my own
The previous iterations of this diagram leaned heavily on the design language of the London Underground’s famous Tube Map – colours, station symbols, line thickness, corner curve radius and more. I’m far more confident in my own ability as a designer now, and feel that this is the time to leave that comfortable, easy solution behind and create something that’s unique and truly mine.
While the colours remain similar to visually link the different versions of the diagram, almost everything else has changed completely. Most notably, the diagram now uses Interstate – a typeface based on that used on road signs across the United States – as its primary font, a far more distinctive and appropriate choice than the previous and somewhat generic Myriad Pro Condensed. The large interchange circles and dumbbells have gone, replaced by a more elegant “one dot per route” marker at each station. This carries across to intermediate cities, which use a similar dot instead of a Tube Map-style “tick”.
Be more rigorous in my design approach
Let’s just say I’ve learned a lot about transit map design since 2011. My approach to this reworking was a lot more methodical, and my design rules were stricter and applied with far less exceptions to make things work. The diagram sits on a 96-point grid, which informs much of the spacing and alignment of the routes, as shown below.
Using this grid helped me to ensure that major highways never get too close to each other, and allows for a nice even rhythm across the entire diagram. Some areas that seemed too cramped in previous versions, like the southeastern states, definitely have more room to breathe now even with some additional future routes added to the mix. Using this grid also helped me work out some fun little design features, like the way that I-4 and I-16 form similar shapes reflected symmetrically along the axis of I-10 between them.
A lot of care was given to labelling this time around (so often an after-thought!) with route numbers always being placed as close as possible to the the relevant terminus dot for easy identification and cross referencing. While having some labels cut across route lines on a complex diagram like this is unavoidable, I’ve really tried to keep it to a minimum and I think there’s less than ten examples of it on the entire piece.
Finally, I think that the simplified outline of the United States on this version makes a more elegant and proportionately “correct” shape than before, which this animation of all three major versions of the map shows rather nicely.
I found this map of the regional rail system in Philly from this 1989 SEPTA map to be interesting. I don’t know of any other map to use octagons. This map is notable for having “temporary” shuttle buses to Newtown and West Chester (service never returned), and for noting that service to Ivy Ridge on the R6 was “temporarily discontinued.” Service also never returned here. Note proposed stations at Claymont (which opened in 1991) and Baldwin (which never reopened) on the R2. This is one of the more aesthetically pleasing regional rail maps I have seen. You can see this and other SEPTA maps and timetables on my Flickr.
The first thing to notice here is just how much more understandable SEPTA Regional Rail service is on a diagram which doesn’t also have to show the subway and street-to-surface lines. This is a clean and simple diagram that uses some nice colour-coding to show the through-running of lines passing through the city center in the Center City Commuter Connection tunnel, which had only opened five years previously in 1984. The three stations highlighted by the unusual octagonal shapes were major components of this project.
The colour-coding is made slightly less effective by that fact that the trunk line from 30th Street all the way around to Glenside that is shared by many of the routes is represented a single grey line – it can sometimes be a little difficult to follow a route along its entire length because of this (the R2 is a good example). However, it’s a fairly simple network, so this isn’t an insurmountable problem.
The map is generally drawn well, though the R8 has to take a pretty unconvincing path from North Philadelphia up towards Chestnut Hill West, and the massively expanded central section means that the labelling gets perhaps a little too cramped towards the outer edges.
Finally, the scourge of “temporarily discontinued” rail services that never returned have rarely been laid out quite so clearly on a single map!
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I came across this lovely piece this morning on Twitter, so here’s a review. This is Andy’s second stab at Edinburgh (see also this map showing an “idealised” 1940s network), and I think it’s clear to see that Andy has come along in leaps and bounds as a map designer since then.
One thing I always appreciate about Andy’s maps is how tactile they seem: they really do look like old printed maps and that’s rather lovely. It’s not just the added “folded paper” texture, but also his colour and design choices that all add up to make his pieces seem so convincingly real. This map has already fooled a few people on Twitter into thinking it’s a real 1920s relic, which is a testament to his work!
Design-wise, I love the rings of route numbers at major stops – an effective device that Andy has borrowed from a real 1924 Edinburgh tram map, but also made very much his own. Overall, the layout is nicely handled and Andy’s even made all-caps labels work well, especially considering the amount of information displayed on the map – trams, buses, main line railways, etc. And it’s not just these lines as they appeared in 1924, either: Andy’s turned this map into a full historical document and also added lines that opened after 1924 (in a nicely-recessive yellow), and lines that were planned but never actually constructed. It does require a fair bit of consulting the legend to work out exactly what some of the lines mean, as different colours and line types combine to show information, but it’s all worthwhile in the end, I think.
Our final word: Stylish and very convincing, this is a great little historical diagram that documents a period in history when tramways dominated Edinburgh’s transportation. Great work, Andy!
So I always wanted to design a diagram for Tokyo, but since it’s so complex I’d postponed it several times until one week that I had nothing to do I started tackling it from scratch, using pen and paper before moving to Affinity Designer. I chose to design a map that includes both Tokyo Metro and Toei Metro, as well as one of the main train lines and the Shinkansen services that arrive to the city. In the end I even put the Chuo Sobu Line from a recommendation a Japanese person made to my design.
Transit Maps says:
Like the London Underground and the New York Subway, making an unofficial map or diagram of Tokyo’s rail network is almost an obligatory rite of a passage for budding designers (perhaps even more so than the other two, because there’s no one “definitive version” of Tokyo’s map). Sergio’s is a particularly handsome effort, though perhaps with a few usability/design issues.
First off, I really like the way that Sergio has used the Toei Oedo Line as his main compositional element, forming a lovely distinctive symmetrical shape in the middle of the diagram that everything else relates to in much the same way that the London Underground diagram uses the Circle Line, which even forms a similar “thermos flask” shape. Most other Tokyo maps I see use the Yamanote Line for this purpose (which make sense as it encircles the city) but this can often make the central part of the map seem too cramped. It does mean that the Yamanote Line on Sergio’s map takes a slightly wobbly path (I’m not entirely convinced by the detour it takes around Shibuya), but I think it’s a decent trade-off. The spacing of stations throughout the map is even and harmonious, and the whole thing, title and legend included, feels like a well-designed, unified whole. On a complex diagram like this, labels cutting across route lines are hard to avoid, but I think Sergio has done a good job of making such labels look clean and deiberate.
I do think that the station codes are too small to be read easily, especially when they’re set in lighter colours (tiny yellow numbers on a white background!). These codes are a primary part of station identification in Tokyo, so reducing their importance so much on a map seems counter-productive. This problem also rolls over into line identification, because these tiny codes are currently the only link between the lines as named in the legend and the map itself. As always, this is especially problematic for colour-blind users.
Indicating that some of the lines offer through-running services to the Greater Tokyo area is a good idea in theory, but where do the lines actually go? An unlabelled dashed line doesn’t really tell anyone very much. As a comparison, the named Shinkansen destinations make those lines much more useful.
Our final word: A well-balanced and attractive diagram of a complex network, though the tiny station codes seem like they’ve been sacrificed for the sake of that aesthetic.
Hello, I just discovered your website, and I want to submit a bus transit map I made last year for the city of Boulder, CO. I hope you consider reviewing it on the blog and letting me know what I can change.
In an effort to improve quality of service, the City of Boulder has taken over and invested heavily in a few select bus routes. As a result, the city has a network of lines with BRT-like frequency on top of a network that is more focused on commuters. There are also a few seasonal high frequency routes catered for university students, and for people trying to visit public amenities like parks with minimal parking.
Transit Maps says:
I quite like this, Stavros – there’s a strong European quality to it with the large rounded-edge station rectangles and generous spacing between parallel route lines. Everything’s nice and evenly spaced and the labelling is generally good, though there’s a few too many diagonal labels for my liking. The spacing between the labels and their corresponding station symbol could be made a bit more consistent throughout: sometimes the label seems to be floating by themselves (see the stops on Lehigh down the bottom left of the map).
Normally, if you’re using the visual device of a route line passing above a station marker to mean “does not stop here”, it’s a good idea to call that out specifically in the legend, as it can be a little ambiguous (as it is visually stronger than the lines that pass beneath the marker, it can seem more important on first reading).
Similarly, when a route line passes through one of the larger station rectangles, I think it’s important to always keep it in the same relative position when it emerges on the other side. It’s harder for a user to trace a route line through a station if it keeps moving around visually. This is especially important if the line changes direction at the station!
After that, it’s just some minor things: the city boundary is a bit rough here and there, especially the slight off-kilter angle it takes next to the legend box down the bottom left. The route number boxes at terminating stops should really all be slightly separated from each other to improve legibility. The legend itself could have more consistent spacing between its headers and subsequent content.
Side note: The frequent service routes are called Hop, Skip, Jump, Bound, and Dash? Now that’s taking a theme and running with it (pun totally intended).
Milwaukee dreaming big in the last days of rail-based mass transit in that city. I can’t find many specifics about this plan, though I do know that the City was attempting to purchase the transit lines in Milwaukee from its private operators at the time, so this study may have something to do with that.
On this map, the thin black lines represent local services, probably a mix of diesel bus, “trackless trolley” and streetcar lines at this point in time. The thick black lines show the Speedrail lines to Waukesha and Hales Corner, the last remnants of a once-extensive electric interurban system. A series of horrific crashes on the Speedrail in 1949 and 1950 spelled the end of these interurban lines, and they closed permanently in 1951.
The green lines are noted as “express lines” in the legend, although the mode of transit to be employed is not noted here. Possibly trolleybuses or upgraded legacy streetcar lines?
Not shown is the North Shore Line that ran between Milwaukee and Chicago, probably because the City was not attempting to purchase that line.
