A solid mid-1980s map of Adelaide’s surprisingly extensive suburban rail network – though there’s less branch lines than seen on this 1978 map, and many of the ones shown here would disappear in the next few years, no longer seen as profitable.
The fact that all rail services are numbered allows short-turn and branch services to be easily discerned – on the green line, the 82 goes from Adelaide Station to Belair, while the 83 continues all the way out to Bridgewater, for example. Of particular note is the “cross-town” 54 route from Outer Harbor to the General Motors Holden plant at Elizabeth: this ran at shift-change times to ferry factory workers to and from the site, as did the 44 from Adelaide itself.
The map itself is simple and clear – definitely an improvement on the 1978 map – and manages to present a lot of information. In addition to the train lines, the map also shows the Glenelg tram (which then only ran into the city as far as Victoria Square) and two key bus routes: the “Bee Line” linking Victoria Square and Adelaide Station, and the Route 100 “Circle Line”. Informational call-outs also highlight timed bus connections at major interchange stations.
The designers seem to have made liberal use of Letratone (like Letraset, but for textures instead of type) on the map, both for water and the zone boundaries – a very 1980s production technique!
Our final word: For the 1980s, this really isn’t bad at all. Information-rich, and done with an absolute minimum of fuss. 3.5 stars out of 5.
The lockdowns have given many people ample opportunities to put their creativity to the test. For me – a lover of public transport, maps and our planet’s northern fringes – it was only a matter of time before the Faroe Islands would pop up once again. A tantalisingly beautiful place with an equally beautiful public transport system. A system of simplicity in a geography so gorgeous.
This map is a clear breakaway from the existing map, which you reviewed back in 2013 (3 stars – Cam). I stepped away from the angular style and instead chose the curly windy way. It also includes one key city bus route that is part of the national network. Text boxes on road planning imply that this map is not to be used for travellers, but time-travellers: it advocates the public transport mind-set in urban planning, in a country where car is king.
The map features a selection of wild proposals and some wilder projects currently under construction. Two sub-sea tunnels are currently in the making, of which particularly the Eysturoyartunnilin (opening soon) is a game changer. It paves the final link in the country’s population centre, stretching from capital Tórshavn over to Runavík and second-city Klaksvík. Trips to the capital will see cuts of half an hour up to 50 minutes, on journeys that currently take 70 minutes.
A cast-iron law in geography has it that when distances halve, interaction doubles. The tunnel will not only reroute traffic (substitution effect) but also create new journeys (induced demand). Obviously there needs to be potential for increased interaction, but the flight of suburbanisation, the ever-increasing pressure on the housing market, and new activity around Runavík are telling. This will put the traffic system under pressure and offers the window to upgrade the current bus system. A frequent, high-quality, storm-proof network with hourly connections is possible in the Tórshavn-Klaksvík axis. At a set headway of every 60 minutes, the routes in this axis form the backbone of the network.
New colours, a new shape, a new network. The result of an experiment basically, to see how the curly concept would work, and in the process this plan grew around it. Not intended for the (armchair) tourist, but for a local audience. So Transit Maps, what’s your verdict?
Transit Maps says:
Regardless of how “wild” these proposals might be, this is a gorgeous map and I applaud Renno for making it. This is exactly the type of thing I’m talking about when I say that maps that show a vision of the future have to be inspirational and dynamic to get people excited to see that vision become a reality. The bright, bold, curved route lines work perfectly in that regard: stylised and stylish, but still linked just enough to the geography of the islands to be recognisable. The frequency of routes is easily discerned by line thickness and the overall visual effect is very pleasing.
The call out boxes are filled with useful information about the projects, though perhaps they could be a little larger for legibility’s sake. There’s plenty of room in the open ocean areas to enlarge them.
My biggest complaint (and it’s still pretty minor) is the drop shadow used on the islands: it’s tonally very similar to the grey used for the islands themselves and seems to blur their outline in parts, especially towards the top of the map where there’s more small islands close to each other. I personally like to use a multiplied blue drop shadow for coastline, perhaps even with a thin keyline separating the land and shadow to keep the shape well defined.
Our final word: I love this – a beautifully executed vision of an ambitious future. 5/5 stars.
Note: Renno wrote some further detailed background information for this project – I include it below for those who want to read further:
Why would people in this windswept place give public transport a chance? For your own benefit and to merit others. For individuals, it saves queuing, parking quests (and parking costs in the future?), tunnel tolls, and it turns the boring 11 km tunnel ride into social media time. This serves pupils and students at Glasir or Handilsskúlin, but also people who work in the capital. People who cannot drive can comfortably visit family or the hospital. Or safely have a drink in town. Meanwhile it enables Tórshavn people to commute to other schools, offices, shops and recreation areas just as easily.
Effective bus systems also reduces negative impacts of traffic on urban space. Tórshavn effectively is a huge car park for its daily stream of commuters. This means stationary metal consumes precious urban space for most of the day. Traffic also produces noise, air pollution and road safety concerns. A Park-and-Ride with frequent buses into town offer an alternative to travel the ‘last mile’.
Especially Hvítanes offers a triple A location for a P+R. All routes combined mount up to over 100 trips per day in each direction. At least 40 SSL buses use the new highway between SMS shopping centre and Hvítanes, while city buses tie all neighbourhoods up to the network every 10 minutes during daytime. Reliability is key. Buses must connect to each other and to all important places. It will get you where you want to go, when you want to go. This requires synced timetables and guaranteed transfers.
There is more. Road and land-use planning must include public transport design. Buses do not like sharp turns or dead-ending streets. The straighter the route and the closer to where the people actually are, the more useful, and the more passengers. Short busways with ‘bus traps’ (bussslúsur) can form a connection between cul-de-sacs (blindgøtur), which normally block off and prevent efficient bus servicing, as collateral damage of keeping undesired cars out of the quiet streets. Bus stops along main roads should include footpaths to the residential areas. Highway exits should have bus stops for intercity buses to leave and re-enter the highway quickly. Shopping centres and regional schools require bus stations nearby. All of this is easy when the iron is hot, but costs a fortune to mend later on.
The Faroe Islands are changing their society with the Eysturoyartunnilin, including mobility and land-use patterns. Towns are growing, útstýkkingar (public greenfield developments) all around, the number of cars doubled in two decades with no ‘flattening the curve’, tourism booming, and commuting a normal ritual of daily life. Four local bus systems have been installed in ten years and Tórshavn’s has expanded. Now it’s time for a vision for the future. Even small design flaws rule out effective mobility for decades to come. Far beyond the next elections.
This plan is NOT to say goodbye to the car, as cars are intrinsically linked to Faroese life. Instead, public transport has the chance to decelerate growth of extra traffic. For those people driving the same trip to Tórshavn day in day out, it can provide a real alternative. Either for the full trip or part of it. On a daily basis or occasionally. With benefits for yourself, your children or other people in the community. Now and in the future.
The Eysturoyartunnilin is the moment to plan the future. Let’s brainstorm, let’s sketch, let’s explore. Would Skálatrøð square still be necessary as a car park, if there’s every 60 minutes a bus directly from Skálafjørður? And every 30 minutes from Kollafjørður? And every 10 minutes from Hvítanes?
This intriguing diagram from the New York Transit Museum’s collection makes the most of its landscape dimensions (possibly two pages in a guide book?) by going sideways as much as possible. Manhattan is impossibly broad, and the Bronx is shown as almost entirely to the east of it. Similar distortions happen just about everywhere, and yet – perhaps a little surprisingly – I still find the overall effect to be quite pleasing. It may not resemble New York’s physical layout very much, but there’s a great graphic feel to it: the route lines are easy to follow and there’s a strong underlying grid underpinning the whole thing.
It’s always fun spotting the different services on old New York Subway maps, and there’s plenty to see here: the JFK Express stands out immediately because of its light blue colour, but there’s more to see the longer you look!
Down the bottom left of the map, there’s a guide to calculating cross streets nearest to Avenue addresses in Manhattan that makes my head spin, although it probably makes perfect sense to native New Yorkers. See if you can work it out!
Our final word: An oddball addition to the many and varied maps of the New York Subway. It’s definitely quirky, but I quite like it in spite of that.
A few requests for a review of this major revision of the Bay Area’s BART map, so here goes…
This map is meant to be deployed when service to Milpitas and Berryessa begins, so it won’t be seen immediately – but it’s good that BART is planning ahead and getting this work done ahead of time.
Generally, there’s a lot to like about this iteration – the stylised coastline suits the schematic treatment of the route lines far better than the old pseudo-geographic approach, for example. The Oakland Airport transfer at Coliseum is treated the same way as other transfers now, rather than the awkward way that a terminus bar butted up to the interchange circles in the previous map.
It’s nice to see all the other rail transit options in the Bay Area on the map (ACE and VTA light rail have been added since the last edition), although I feel that the different line thicknesses (apparently to indicate level of service) are executed a little clumsily and are perhaps unnecessary on a map of this scope. At least this revision of the map corrects an error from a previous draft that had Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor and San Joaquin services diverging in the wrong place.
Because of the extra spacing given to BART services down the peninsula to Millbrae, the Caltrain stations south of that point get jammed together very tightly, which isn’t ideal. I’m also not overly impressed with the blobby station markers used for these secondary services, as their size changes depending on the line thickness: at Santa Clara and Diridon, there are three different dot sizes adjacent to each other, which looks pretty haphazard.
Finally, although the new octolinear diagram looks fine, I do miss the distinctive slanted hexagonal treatment of the previous map… it was a distinctive design element that suited the layout of the network particularly well and set the BART map apart from so many other maps around the world.
Our final word: Looking to the future with some style. The area around San Jose will probably be revisited and revised as services come online in the future. Three-and-a-half stars.
Submitted by Chinmay Kunkikar, who simply asks for a review of this map (which is probably long overdue – Cam).
Transit Maps says:
While many modern transit maps bear some sort of debt to Harry Beck’s pioneering London Underground diagram, most of them don’t wear their influences quite as openly as the Delhi Metro map. Not content with using almost identical iconography, it even uses Johnston Sans for its English language labels.
However, it’s certainly not as accomplished as its famous forebear and feels quite clumsy in its execution. The central part is very cramped and there’s quite a few non-standard angles used throughout. In a way, it feels like new lines have simply been tacked onto the map as they’ve opened, without any thought as to how the map works as a unified whole. Why is the grey Line 9 so thick, and why is Dwarka’s label so big? The light green background makes the yellow Line 2 pretty hard work to read.
A fault it shares with the Tube Map is the lack of identifiers for the lines on the actual map: their colour is the only way to tell them apart – which, quite simply, isn’t good enough. With 12 lines to show, there really have to be numbered bullets at each end of every line to help people unfamiliar with the system find their way around.
Our final word: Apes the design style of the Tube Map, but to considerably less effect. Feels unoriginal and half-hearted. Two stars. See Jug Cerovic’s unofficial INAT map for a far more confident approach.
This handsome birds-eye view map of eastern Washington State comes from the Pullman Primer, a prospectus put together by the Pullman Chamber of Commerce in 1911 to attract business to the city. It shows the city nestled in the foreground, surrounded by the fertile lands of the Palouse, with Seattle and Portland in the far distance. All across the plains stretch the lines of the many and varied railroad companies of the day, connecting Pullman with the wider world.
Upon further inspection, it can be seen that one of the lines into Pullman – that of the Spokane & Inland Empire Electric Railway from Colfax – is only proposed at this point in time (and was never actually ever constructed). You really can’t blame the Chamber of Commerce for attempting to leverage that potential connection for all it’s worth, though!
The S&IE is a fascinating railway, however: an electric interurban system that carried both passengers and freight from Spokane to far-flung Colfax; Moscow, Idaho; and Coeur d’Alene from 1904–1929. I’ve previously mapped out the network as it existed at its apogee in 1920: click here to see the map.
France is starting to reopen after its COVID-19 shutdown. This map shows the Métro stations that will be closed on reopening day. It seems the criterion in selecting which stations will be open and which ones closed is to try to avoid overcrowding. Map from Le Parisien, based on this map from the RATP (link no longer active – Cam).
Transit Maps says:
While I appreciate the intentions of the newspaper in publishing this map, it’s unfortunately not great. The naming of stations seems to be almost random, with only a few of the 60 stations that will be closed earning labels, while some – but not all – of the terminus stations get ridiculously enormous bold labels. It’s not too bad in the end, because the article that this graphic accompanies lists all of the closures line by line, but it’s still a curious approach. One wonders why they don’t just point their readers to the official RATP map?
Speaking of which, the layout of this little diagram actually matches the RATP map exactly (I overlaid them in Photoshop to check), so it would seem that the newspaper’s designers just used that as a basis for theirs. It’s really instructive to note how random and disorganized the network looks without the familiar path of the Seine running through the city.
In between writing this blog, designing my own maps, and digitally restoring vintage maps, I also like to map out old, forgotten streetcar and electric interurban networks in Google Maps. I mainly do it because I want to compile information from various sources into one place and build my own coherent understanding of the networks that once existed.
Having done a few of these maps now, I thought I’d share a few tips on how I go about it and some of my favourite “go-to” resources on the internet for this type of research. Note that these tips are tailored for research in the United States, but similar resources may exist regardless of where you are located.
First off, it goes without saying that Google is your friend here. Bombard it with all the search queries you can think of – all the variants for operating names of the rail companies you’re interested in, dates, city names, streetcar/trolley/interurban, etc. It’s probably going to return lots of little, unconnected bits of information, but sometimes you’ll get lucky and get most of what you’re after in terms of the general history of the company, the names of some of the routes, and maybe even a rough map or two, like this one for the Boise interurban loop. Normally, you won’t get enough from this to plot anything on top of a Google street map, but it’s great for context and history and some station names you can use as additional search queries.
To really be able to plot things properly, you’re going to need maps that come from the time period that you’re trying to map, and the more you can find, the better. My first port of call these days is historical county atlases, and Historic Map Works has a wide selection of them. Just choose your state and then see if there’s a county atlas or gazette for the area and time frame you’re after. Here in the Pacific Northwest, there’s almost always a Metsker Maps atlas available, which is fantastic. Generally, these atlases break the whole county down into page-sized chunks (great for interurbans) and have separate maps for urban areas (which can help with streetcars). Do note that they’re not always totally accurate: the 1932 atlas for Umatilla County, Oregon completely omits the Walla Walla Valley Traction Company’s branch line from Milton-Freewater to Umapine, even though it had been in operation for eight years by that point.
Historical topographical maps can also be useful, but can be very hit-and-miss as to whether there’s one at the right scale and time period to show what you’re after. If you want to quickly look through what’s available, the USGS TopoView website is your best bet. Simply type in the name of the city you’re after or drop a pin on the map and it’ll give you a list of all the historical topographic maps for that area. You can overlay them on the map on the site and even adjust opacity to see both maps at the same time. Neat!
Other good places to find historical maps: County and City archives websites, historical society and museum websites, university archives (especially for rural universities, which often act as historical repositories for their local area), and sometimes even personal blogs from people who are similarly interested in these things. A few examples: this 1929 map of Walla Walla County came from the Washington State University Library, and gave me most of the names of stations on the interurban line to Milton-Freewater. The fantastic track engineering blueprint below came directly from the Yakima Valley Trolley Museum website and was invaluable in piecing together how the line north of Selah ran.
Sometimes however, you just get completely lucky. For example, I wasn’t getting anywhere with working out the path of the Umapine branch mentioned above – I knew it had existed once upon a time, and where it started and ended, but nothing else. Then I stumbled by chance upon a directory of old railroad maps on the Umatilla County Surveyor’s website and there was the blueprint for the line, showing absolutely everything I needed to know. In the end, it was narrowing my search terms down to look for a specific and distinctive station name – Prunedale – along the line that led me to what I was after. So, be persistent and precise!
If you can find them or have access to them, the Official Guide to the Railways can be useful as well. Larger systems often have a rudimentary map, and even smaller ones usually have a timetable with a helpful list of station names. I have PDFs of the Guides for 1910, 1921, 1923 and 1930 on my hard drive and refer to them a lot.
When it comes to actually plotting your lines onto your base Google Map, there are two tricks I use all the time. In urban areas, zoom in until you can see tax lot boundaries. A surprising amount of the time, the old railroad right of way can still be discerned, winding its way invisibly through the city. You can also look out for giveaway street names like “Electric Avenue” or “Depot Street”. In rural areas, try switching to satellite mode – the right of way often leaves a distinctive scar across the landscape that’s easy to track.
That’s pretty much it from me. Do you have any research tips, tricks or resources that I haven’t mentioned? Have you researched and made your own map? Leave a comment below if you’ve got something to add!
This interesting little diagram was posted on Twitter recently and brought to my attention by some of my followers.
Its owner, Moritz Bernoully, said that it was purchased with a little plastic wallet from a vendor in the Mexico City Metro in 2012 (just before Line 12 opened and made this diagram redundant), and he doesn’t think that it’s an officially-produced diagram because of that provenance. It certainly looks cheaply made, as it’s just one-colour printing on a small sheet of paper.
Despite that single colour, this little diagram makes a truly heroic effort to depict the massive Metro network, using large numbers and all the possible tints of purple that it can to differentiate between all the lines as best it can. Most routes can be followed with a little bit of effort, though some are harder than others (Line 1’s route gets a little hazy as it winds its way across the centre of the diagram, for example).
The diagram is mainly notable for its use of the famous Mexico City Metro icons for termini and interchange stations, which is actually pretty smart thinking. It’s something that the official map could consider, in my opinion. Some of the icons don’t reproduce that well in tints of purple, but it’s enough to get the idea across. The other bit of “out of the box” thinking is the use of a space-saving star glyph in the station name “Cerro de la Estrella” – clever!
Our final word: While this diagram isn’t going to win any design awards, it’s simple, compact and does a lot of hard work with very limited materials. Two-and-a-half stars.
Here at Transit Maps, we love a good cutaway diagram of station layouts, and this one is a classic. Sent our way by David Auerbach, it shows the combined Paris Métro/RER Châtelet–Les Halles complex in Paris – a transit hub so massive that Métro Line 4 has two separate stations within it!
On this diagram, the white SNCF tunnels shown as “en projet” correspond to the modern RER Line D, which began service in 1987 using the centre platforms on the RER level. Of course, the station is even more complicated these days with the additional Métro platforms for Line 14 jammed in between the Châtelet platforms for Lines 1 and 4!
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