A few years back I made a quick sketch for my friend showing the relationships between Pixies and Throwing Muses and their associated bands. For her recent birthday I made this subway map version for her, because, of course I did. Who doesn’t want a subway map for their birthday?
Transit Maps says:
Any resemblance to my mid-1990s CD collection is entirely coincidental, I assure you!
I like this, Brian – the subway map design metaphor is appropriately employed for once, but you’ve also given a nice designery pop-art feel to the piece as well. I particularly like the interplay between the warm “Pixies” and cool “Throwing Muses” colours across the map, and the interconnected “engagement” rings for Kristen Hersh and Fred Abong are a really nice touch as well.
The MTA released a beta version of a new online real-time subway map this morning, supposedly a fusion between the design sensibilities of the Vignelli diagram and the modern subway map’s geographical pragmatism. There’s certainly been a big PR push, with effusive articles being written about it and even a mini-documentary film by Gary Huswit of Helvetica fame. With all this hoopla, I had to go investigate myself… and I came away unimpressed.
First things first: the map is as slow as heck in Chrome on my iMac, and barely works at all in Safari, neither of which are particularly encouraging starts. It does run somewhat better on mobile, but we’ll have to see if the speed on desktop computers improves over the next few days, as it’s not really usable at present.
The main selling point of this map is that it has the clarity of a diagram but the fidelity of a geographical map – “The best of both worlds!” the articles happily proclaimed this morning – but the reality is more like “Jack of all trades; master of none.” As much as I try, I simply can’t see any real benefit to this approach.
A geographical base map is meant to give veracity to the data layers above it, grounding them in the real world. And this is true – for the station locations, which are fairly accurately placed. However, the paths the subway lines take between these points often bear no relation to the base map, or even reality. Let’s take a look at the services that travel across the Manhattan Bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn – the B, D, N and Q. Because of the simplified paths drawn, the B and D completely miss the bridge – clearly shown on the base layer underneath it – and seem to cross the river in a new, previously undiscovered tunnel. And inexplicably, the N and Q don’t cross the river anywhere near the Manhattan Bridge, but continue all the way down to lower Manhattan and apparently share the same tunnel as the 4 and 5 to get to Brooklyn! The station order is correct – Canal Street to DeKalb Avenue – but the route taken on the map to get there is sheer insanity.
This kind of stuff appears randomly all over the map: some lines follow the roads that they’re aligned to in real life fairly faithfully, while others stair-step their way to their destination like a 90-degree-angle-only diagram. All of the lines down to Coney Island are treated differently and it’s a visual nightmare. In real life, it’s a straight shot from Brighton Beach to Coney Island/Stillwell Avenue – look what the diagram does:
Quite frankly, there’s really no reason for this map to be diagrammatic at all outside of Manhattan – which, owing to its famous grid forms a diagram naturally. Most of the lines out in the boroughs follow a road (either elevated or dug cut-and-cover), so why not just follow them accurately and honour the base map? It’d be a more consistent approach than the “sometimes but not always” approach that’s currently been taken.
Next, let’s consider the design language of the diagram, which has fairly obviously been cribbed straight from the modern iteration of the Vignelli diagram. However, because the diagram is placed on a sprawling geographical base map instead of being a compact schematic, all the elements render too small at all but the most zoomed-in levels. The route lines are thin, the station dots are too small and the itty-bitty letters that designate services at each station are almost completely impossible to read. And once you zoom in close enough to be able to see these properly, you lose the ability to read the whole map in order to work out connections. It’s really not great, usability-wise.
There’s technical problems too: parallel 45-degree curves don’t nest properly, some route lines appear slightly on top of others at certain zoom levels, some stations sit directly on changes of direction, corner radii are inconsistently applied (and missing altogether in many locations, despite a big deal being made about the “smooth curves” present in the map). This is stuff only a wonk like me notices, but it still leaves an unfavourable first impression.
That said, the way the map can display real-time train information and adapt on the fly to service changes is certainly very impressive, as is the way more or less information is displayed depending on the zoom level. I particularly like the way that the individual service lines roll up into single trunk lines at the most zoomed-out views. It seems to me that the technology behind the map is pretty solid and is the real “revolutionary” part of this service, but the presentation of it definitely needs some polishing and refinement, because this is pretty poor and inconsistent at the moment.
A scanned slide showing a section of a wall-mounted Tokyo Metro map at a station (possibly Tokyo, judging by the dirty finger marks concentrated there). The lines of the Tokyo Metro are rendered in thick, bold colours that match pretty well with the current designations – yellow/gold for the Ginza Line, red for the Marunouchi Line, and grey/silver for the Hibiya Line. The competing Toei Subway’s Asakusa Line is not rendered in its modern pink/rose colour, but as a thinner navy blue line: it’s simply labelled as “Tokyo Municipal Sub Way” on the legend (see this image that shows more of the map) as it was the only Toei line in operation at the time.
The map itself is pretty chaotic, with lines headed in just about every direction imaginable, but it has a kind of naive charm to it. In a way, the neat ring of the Yamanote Line (passing across the horizontal middle of this image) defines the shape of the map: because it’s rendered as a rounded rectangle, all the subway lines have to take erratic paths to fit!
It is interesting to note that the station names are set in Futura Bold inside a bold ring of the line’s colour – something that has become a major part of the wayfinding system for the subways in Tokyo today. Each line is designated a letter – “G” for Ginza, for example – that is always shown as Futura Bold inside a thick ring of that line’s colour. It’s definitely very interesting to see the start of that evolution here.
Worst map? High quality map I found while researching random rural transportation systems in the middle of nowhere across the country. I have to say, their website design is not much better either.
Transit Maps says:
It’s all so easy to look at this very basic map and say that it’s terrible, but we do need to be mindful that these small regional transit services operate on shoestring budgets with minimal staff and resources. Looking at the metadata of the PDF, I can see that it’s been produced in Microsoft Publisher (not really a first choice for transit map design!) and the name attached to the “Author” field is that of TranGo’s General Manager – it looks like they wear a lot of different hats within the organization if they’re the ones producing the timetable brochure and map!
One thing the map does do really well within its simple framework is differentiate between its routes by using shapes as well as colour – meaning that it’s actually quite accessible for colour-blind users, even if the method employed is a little unconventional.
I’d also argue that the simplicity doesn’t matter that much, as the geography of this part of Washington means that there’s really only one way to get from one town to another: Okanogan to Twisp? State Highway 20. Brewster to Okanogan? U.S. Highway 97. And so on. In a way, this little diagram is simply a quick way of showing which towns are directly connected by bus services and no more, and in that it generally succeeds. There is a more detailed interactive map available on TranGo’s website which shows full routes, bus stops and schedule information, so this map isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of map from the agency.
I will also say that the TranGo logo is quite nice, though perhaps it’s uncomfortably similar to the previous SFMTA logo (which itself was accused of plagiarism at the time it was introduced).
Our final word: No, it’s not great – but it does the job in the context it’s used in (an introductory brochure about transit in the area) and the constraints it was produced under.
I originally posted this map on Twitter, but I’m also putting it on the blog for posterity, as well as to fully detail the design decisions that went into it.
I’ve long thought that there’s been a design opportunity with Denver rail maps for a large circular arc for the light rail stations running south around the edge of the downtown area out of Union Station. I’ve doodled with ideas over the years, but I’ve never found them particularly satisfying or aesthetically pleasing. There was always a disconnect between the curved sections and the regular orthogonal lines which stopped the map acting as a cohesive whole. Until finally, I thought: what if I did away with straight lines all together?
It was certainly a concept well outside my comfort zone, as I’m very much used to working with straight lines and 45-degree angles. The relationship between elements is fairly easy for me to define when working within these “regular” design rules, but curved lines are another whole world to me! I had to draw an intentionally loose working diagram with a Sharpie before I even started work on the computer to convince myself that this could even be done. The fat tip of the Sharpie prevented me from getting overly concerned with detail, allowing me to concentrate on the general form and flow of the map. One thing it showed me was that such a diagram was still basically topologically correct: all the lines ended up in the pretty much the right place relative to each other. Encouraged, I began!
Even with the sketch, it look me a few different versions before I finally hit upon a workable solution to my problem: spirals! Concentric circles were almost there, but created an ugly “peanut” shape in the middle of the map (which you can see in the working sketch), where I really wanted a smooth curve from Union Station all the way around to Peoria. Some trial-and-error gave me the right spiral decay required to achieve this and still leave room for station labelling, and then I set up a set of nested spirals for all the lines out of Union Station to act as master curves. From there, it was really just a matter of cutting the spirals at the right points and rotating/reflecting them to join back together correctly. In a way, I basically “unrolled” the spirals to go where I needed them to – along with a couple of shorter connecting curves where the lines change direction sharply (see the “G” and “W” lines). Spacing stations evenly along the curves provided a new challenge, but I was able to work out a system that gave pleasing results: there’s a lot more eyeballing and manual adjustment of labels to get things looking optically “right” than there is with standard 45-degree maps!
The downtown loop was probably the most challenging part of the map, and I almost chickened out and made those lines straight. However, I persevered and came up with a solution that allowed me to keep everything curvy while still staying somewhat true to the real-world alignment of things. I’m especially pleased with the way that the “L” line swoops gracefully up to join the “A” line at 38th & Blake: it made this troublesome part worth the effort!
While I’m extremely happy with the finished product, there are still a few things that I can improve – not the least of which is learning to manipulate Bezier curves so that the end result looks more organic and a little less mathematical. It’s a real skill, and I’m not quite there yet. Some have commented that the map is incomplete without the downtown/mall shuttle buses and the Flatiron Flyer bus services to Boulder, and these concerns are completely valid. I’m not sure I’ll ever address them, as I feel I’ve done what I wanted to with this proof-of-concept map, but I hear you!
However, the map has generally been received quite well, which is pretty darn gratifying when you take a left-field design approach. Some comments from Twitter are featured below: let me know what you think in the comments!
This is a remarkable work, congratulations!
Balanced, consistent and beautiful.
There is a thin line between joyful curves and drunken curves that you did not cross, well done.
Very nice! Denver's arterial streets are so orthogonal that I would never have thought of it working there. And props for nicely distinguishing the two Union Station termini that are actually a block apart.
This is just great. A huge leap forward, I guess. Congratulations and best luck with that direction! I am absolutely sure, you will achieve the best curve smoothness and plasticity with a time. There are no doubts. And special thanks for sharing the insights. It's brave.
Australia’s two rival cities are currently separated by Covid-Curtain. Whilst commuters are also separated from their daily commute in the meantime, let’s explore an alternate universe timeline where the cities have swapped their network maps!
Transit Maps says:
What a fun little project!
What I particularly like is just how far Tom has taken the “body swap”: the real Melbourne map shows V-Line services out into regional Victoria, so the “Melbourne-ised” Sydney map does the same… whereas the official Sydney map stops at the edges of Greater Sydney, so the “Sydney-fied” Melbourne map follows suit. City Circle becomes City Loop, and vice versa. Line nomenclature gets swapped, and so on. Even service names become more like their adopted homes: V-Line becomes VicLink to mimic NSW’s TrainLink. It’s all rather wonderfully done.
Overall, Tom has done a great job of recreating each style, although the type for the Melbourne map isn’t quite the right font and should be black instead of dark gray. The big terminus lettering for Cranbourne and Frankston seems unnecessarily cramped, and I really would have liked to see the Stony Point Shuttle line use the exact shade of teal that the Sydney Metro uses – most of the work has already been done by using the same cased line and the superfluous “S” for each station marker… the right colour just would have made everything perfect. The Sydney map is pretty much spot-on, however – even down to the way that lines outside the “zone boundary” get compressed into very tight and unrealistic spaces.
The other main takeaway is just how much this version of Sydney map looks like the pre-2013 CityRail map (September 2012, 3.5 stars), which probably says something about the slightly more generic design language that the current Melbourne map uses: ticks for stations, rounded corner rectangles for interchanges, etc.
Long before the current idea of putting Teslas in tunnels and calling it rapid transit, there was PRT, or Personal Rapid Transit. The idea was that many small carriages on guideways could take people directly to their intended destination anywhere along the route – described as a “horizontal elevator” by John Volpe, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation at the time.
In the early 1970s, Denver beat out 29 other cities around the U.S. and was given an $11 million grant to explore this new technology. This map was produced by the Rocky Mountain News to accompany an article about the project in October 1972. This looks like the original camera-ready artwork, complete with white paint touch-ups. The reproduction in the newspaper would have been much cleaner than this. The obvious hand-lettering for some of the road labels strikes me as a bit slap-dash, and I actually wonder whether the lighter parts of the map were meant to reproduce at all or are just there as a guide for the graphic artist to draw the final map on top of. PMT cameras generally just exposed either pure black or white unless a halftone screen was employed, so I could well believe that the lighter parts would just drop out during exposure. Yes, I operated one of these cameras for the first three or four years of my graphic design career…
Spoiler: the Denver PRT never got built, as public opinion rapidly turned against it once everyone realised there’d be elevated PRT guideways all over town (the plan was for over 100 miles of PRT track!) and the whole thing was going to be extraordinarily expensive. The initial 5.5-mile demonstration track shown here was originally estimated at $40 million, or around $248.7 million in today’s money.
More information on this weird chapter in Denver’s transportation history can be found in this article at the Denver Public Library.
I saw your already covered the Paris regional public transport map before, and I was wondering whether you had seen the very cute compact version you can see on the Vianavigo site when you zoom out. What do you think?
Transit Maps says:
Tiny and adorable, this diagram really only exists to say, “Hey, you’ve zoomed out too far!” Impressively though, it retains the same structure as the more detailed maps of the other zoom levels, which gives a seamless effect when zooming in and out. Each level of zoom on the site introduces more detail – it’s only when you zoom all the way in that all the Métro stations are labelled, for example – which is a nice use of the interactive map technology. Viewing maps online in small viewports is not my favourite way of doing things, but at least this map has considered its content at each view level: regional overview drilling down to a detailed station-by-station view.
This tiny diagram might only be a placeholder but all the terminus stations are labelled, so it still has some use. And with its thick lines and white station dots, there’s just a hint of the old Rudi Meyer RER diagrams in it as well. Perhaps some parts are overly detailed (the logos for the Orlybus and CDGVAL services; the under-construction part of Line “L”), but it still holds together fairly well. I like it as a tiny little “rough sketch” of the regional lines, inviting you to zoom further in.
On from the “what could have been?” files – a proposed double-decker trolleybus service covering 76 kilometres (just under 50 miles) of routes in West Yorkshire.
Between 1980 and 1990, the West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive repeatedly attempted to gain government funding for this project: this leaflet looks like one of those efforts, extolling the benefits of such a network. Eventually, a private bus operator announced a plan to operate a diesel bus service along the proposed route and the initiative was shelved. Of interest is the concept that the trolleybus could eventually be replaced by a “new Rapid Transit System” called ElectroLine – very similar to the idea often presented today that BRT can be replaced with light rail when ridership reaches a certain level.
The map itself is simple and high-level, with the three phases of the project simply denoted by colour. There’s no detailed route or stop information, but it serves the purpose of supporting the text on the page. The real winner here is the little illustration of a proposed double-decker trolleybus vehicle… lovely!
Still love reading your blog after all these years. The NTA has just released a new map for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area mass transit system. There are currently three light rail lines under construction (red, green, and purple), partly running underground, and due to be completed by 2026. A metro is planned for launch around 2040.
I felt that while the official map is not bad, it does not have a clear hierarchy between the two modes. It also lacked coherence with strange and inconsistent angles. On the plus side, the official map respects geography more than mine, and shows all the station names.
So I decided to knock together something of my own in Visio (yes, I know). The remit was to create a metro-focused map with 60 degree angles to create a triangular theme. The light rail lines are inserted around the metro layout. The theme comes at the expense of geographical fidelity.
Apologies that it is only in Hebrew at this point in time. The solid blobs are metro and underground light rail stations. The large hollow blobs are light rail stations that interchange with metro or rail. I decided not to label all the other light rail stations.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Transit Maps says:
Alan’s done a pretty good job of self-analysing his own diagram above, and I agree on most of his points. I find his diagram superior to the official map in most respects: it may be more geographically correct, but it lacks visual punch and clarity. The lines just sort of wander across the canvas, and there’s no real differentiation between the light rail lines and the Metro itself.
Alan’s 30/60 degree lines give coherence to the network and have a pleasing angularity to them that suits the Hebrew script used for the labels. The triangular shape made by the circumferential M3 is a particularly nice design element. Breaking the M1 and M3 up into separate lines to show their service patterns works well: it’s especially good at showing that the service to the airport will operate as two-station branch line. Perhaps an airport icon like the official map employs could be useful?
Alan highlights what he sees as a major flaw of his own diagram: that the light rail lines only have labels for a few stations. However, as the focus of the diagram is to be “Metro-centric” (in Alan’s own words), I think this is forgivable. There’s enough information to work out how the two networks interchange with each other, and the Metro is given good emphasis over the light rail.
Our final word: A lovely diagram, with some great compositional work and simplification. Nice work, Alan!
