Sent my way by Twitter user @andrewsalzberg, here’s another board game based on a transit system – this time, Montreal’s Metro! (Readers may remember this post about “The London Game”, a board game based on the London Underground.)
Looks like a pretty simple “race” game, but it captures the aesthetics of the actual map quite nicely.
Source: Openalex website – link no longer active
Here’s a map that has been requested quite a few times, but I’ve held off on until now. Having lived in Sydney most of my life, I think it’s difficult to be dispassionate about something I’m so familiar with… but here goes!
Have we been there? You know it!
What we like: Clear and easy to understand. Different types of services are denoted well, but in a nicely understated way: grey lines with coloured ticks that relate to the suburban lines they share track with for intercity routes works very well. Thinner, subordinate lines for country bus routes also share their colour with their related train route, carrying a nice “colour equals compass direction” theme through the whole map.
Comprehensive legend and a well-considered set of explanatory icons. The grid and corresponding list of stations is a nice usability touch for those less familiar with the system.
What we don’t like: Some terribly cramped station names, especially on the Illawarra Line between Arncliffe and Jannali. In fact, the unevenness of station name spacing throughout the whole map is one of its biggest flaws.
Part of this comes from having to show all CityRail services, all the way out to far-distant destinations. Goulburn (at the bottom left) is almost 200km (125 miles) from the centre of Sydney! Older CityRail maps concentrated solely on the suburban area of Sydney, with arrows and text indicating service to distant points, which gave the map more room to breathe. I’m not saying that a map like this one isn’t important, but it could be supplemented by a second map that deals with just the city.
The other main failing of the map is its attempt to place a diagrammatic representation of the network onto a “geographical” background. I’ll tell you now – Sydney’s coastline looks nothing like this. Everything is horribly distorted and the difference in style between angled diagram and “naturalistic” coast is jarring to my eye.
Our rating: Despite a couple of major problems, this map still manages to take a large, sprawling commuter and interurban rail system (plus buses and light rail!) and make it clearly understood. Clean design and nice colour choices help a lot (the Bankstown Line looks much better in orange than its old brown). Three-and-a-half stars.
Source: CityRail website
I was reminded today of this work — one of my favourite transit map design exercises of all time from the always interesting Burrito Justice website. A ridiculously minimalist “hyperlinear” version of the BART map, it actually holds up surprisingly well as a navigational tool. Of course, something like this only works for a relatively simple system like BART.
Source: comments thread of this post on the Burrito Justice site
Released by the MTA just eight days after 9/11, this map shows how radically lower Manhattan service was affected.
Source: 2nd Ave Sagas website
Created for an exhibition at the London Design Museum, I believe this is also a functional radio as well as a kick-ass representation of the London Underground. The intricate level of detail just has to be seen to be believed. Can I have one?
I’ve seen a few comments around the Internet that this piece brings the Tube Map full circle as Harry Beck was an electrical draughtsman who based his design off circuit diagrams. To the best of my knowledge, there is no conclusive evidence that Beck did this at all.
While he would have been familiar with circuit diagrams in his role as an engineering draughtsman (see the subtle difference in job titles?), he only ever said that his Diagram evolved out of a desire to simplify the system. It’s far more likely that he was actually influenced by the seminal work of George Dow for the LNER. However, this popular conception remains, probably due in no small part to this “joke” circuit diagram that Beck produced in 1933 after colleagues pointed out the similarities.
Source: DesignBoom
Reader Jon Sivell sent me this awesome photo of an out-of-date “A” map, still in situ at Far Rockaway/Mott Ave station, the last stop at the very bottom right of this map. It dates from prior to 2003, as it shows a shuttle bus from Howard Beach/JFK Airport, not the AirTrain. Anyone have anything else that can pin the date down a little better?
Edit: With the help of some eagle-eyed readers, we’ve narrowed this down to being from between 1989 (when the “9” service began) and 1998 (when the “B” stopped terminating at 168th Street).
Here’s a submission via the Transit Maps Facebook Page from reader Dave Kramer. This is a beautiful map of NS rail service within the Netherland’s Randstad region: an informal name for the conurbation of the four largest Dutch cities – Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht – and the surrounding areas.With a combined population of 7.1 million, it’s one of the largest conurbations in Europe and is serviced by a comprehensive rail system.
Dave points out that the map was created in 2009, so the routes may or may not be totally accurate now (I seem to recall a Sprinter train that ran through Schiphol to Amsterdam when I was there in late 2010, but I may be wrong).
Have we been there? My sole experience with NS trains has been from Schiphol to Amsterdam Centraal and back again.
What we like: Looks fantastic. A very clean, stylish and oh-so-European diagram. The typography is particularly nice (I can even forgive the 90-degree angled type because it’s handled so deftly). Different levels of service are denoted through use of colour alone – a dangerous approach when considering color-blind users – but there’s enough contrast between those colours for it to work relatively well (I ran the map through a colour-blindness simulator to check this).
What we don’t like: Major hub stations where every train stops could benefit from an “interchange station” style marker, rather than individual dots on each line. This is especially true for all the “Centraal” stations. The final destinations of routes that leave the Randstad are labelled within the route lines themselves, which makes them a little small and hard to read.
Our rating: Excellent. 4 stars!
Source: Dave Kramer
Here’s the map for Munich’s S-Bahn network… interestingly placed on the outside of a train. I like the line drawing of Munich’s distinctive skyline.
Source: NiceBastard/Flickr
