My Boston MBTA Map: Work in Progress 2

February 22, 2012
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By the time you read this, I’ll be lazing around on a beach in Hawaii on a well-earned break – but thanks to the wonders of scheduled posts, I can still share this new teaser image of my ongoing Boston MBTA map redesign with you.

This one shows the central part of Boston with my conceptual grid overlaid on top, so you can see how important elements relate to each other. Every design decision made here is intentional: this is not one of those grids people create at the end of a project to make it look better thought-out than it actually was.

I decided right at the beginning that the Orange and Green lines should form a big sweeping arc centred on Bowdoin station; it just seemed more elegant than short curves linked by straight segments. Note how the radius used for the Green Line’s curve is then repeated for the Blue Line between Government Center and Aquarium. The Orange Line’s radius is reused and flipped northwards of North Station. The Red Line is also neatly and perfectly tangential to the radius of the Orange Line as it heads towards Charles/MGH.

The other major compositional element is the strong horizontal axis created along the Red Line, through Bowdoin, Haymarket and Maverick stations, and on to the “C” marker for the Airport Silver Line station. This gives the whole map a strong visual base to hold it together, and works really well in my opinion.

Official Map: Vaporetto Routes of Venice, Italy, 2012

February 18, 2012
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Venice is one of those places that has to be experienced to fully appreciate it. Forever and inextricably tied to the ocean, Venice’s transit system has always been vaporetti and traghetti rather than buses and trains. You walk, or you get on a boat – there is no other way to get around. As shown in my photo above (taken on a misty morning at the Ferrovia wharf), there’s a certain sense of mystery and timelessness to Venice, but I feel this map fails to live up to that expectation.

Have we been there? Yes back in 2003. Cruising the Grand Canal on the No. 1 is awesome, as is heading out to Murano and Burano on the lagoon.

What we like: A comprehensive guide to waterborne transit services in Venice. Uses San Marco as its major landmark, as well as cleverly showing the bridges (also important landmarks and attractions) that cross the Grand Canal.

What we don’t like: Surprisingly hard to read – there’s a lot of routes, and following them around the twisty canals to the individual wharves is not easy. It’s sometimes also hard to make out which side of the canal a stop is on.Doesn’t show the locations where the traghetti – large passenger gondolas – cross the Grand Canal: an important passenger link (but admittedly mainly used only by locals).

Despite the nice design that the map is wrapped in (I love the “HelloVenezia” logo), the map itself is very bland, with a dull grey background and standard Helvetica text.

Our rating: A hugely wasted opportunity to make something as unique as the city of Venice itself. No sense of place or history. Two-and-a-half-stars.

Source: Hello Venezia website

Photo: London Underground Bathroom

February 16, 2012
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Some guy installed the London Underground in his bathroom. Badass.

Source: amanda-lwin/Tumblr

My Boston MBTA Map: Work in Progress 1

February 15, 2012
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What’s that, Green Line? Yes, I do think you look wonderful when all your stations are shown! A work in progress screen shot of my Boston MBTA “T” map redesign. And this isn’t even the coolest part. Stay tuned!

Official Map: Key Bus Routes in Central London, 2012

February 11, 2012
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This charming diagram produced by Transport for London is obviously targeted at tourists, but still manages to pack a lot of information in – bus routes, tourist attractions, connections to the Tube, Overground, DLR, National Rail and river ferries. That it still manages to look attractive and be easy to follow makes it all the better.

Have we been there? Yes, and I even got off the Tube to catch a bus here and there.

What we like: Clean design that borrows many recognisable elements from the London Tube map, especially the distinctive Johnston Sans. Lovely little cameo illustrations for the tourist attractions.

What we don’t like: Not useful for plotting a walking route between points of interest – this map is about transportation options only. Some of the stops with many routes passing through it could do with a linking “interchange station” instead of individual dots – it can get difficult to trace the dots across seven or eight routes to find the location name. The map gives you no idea of how long a bus trip through excruciatingly congested London traffic might take. I caught the 74 from Marble Arch to Putney once and it took absolutely forever to get there.

Our rating: A welcome addition to the London transit family of maps, charming and useful at the same time. Three-and-a-half-stars.

Source: VisitLondon.com

Official Map: Glasgow Subway (Before and After)

February 10, 2012
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It’s always fun to do a comparison between old and new maps, and we have a great opportunity with this very recent rebranding of the Glasgow Subway (the third-oldest subway system in the world at 115 years of age, after the London Underground and the Budapest Metro). A deceptively simple system, the Subway consists of a single loop with 15 stations — trains run clockwise on the Outer Circle, and anti-clockwise on the Inner Circle. If the font used on the new map (second image below) looks familiar, it should — it’s Klavika, also used (in a slightly modified form) as the Facebook logo.

The new map definitely lifts the corporate branding standards of the SPT — the map ties in nicely with the new website and station signage and looks new, clean and modern. It’ll be interesting to see if the heavy use of Klavika — a very “now” typeface — dates this work badly in a few years time. Interestingly, the new map doesn’t indicate which direction the Inner and Outer Circles run in, although the arrows were pretty hideous on the old map.

One element of the old map that I do miss with the new is the lovely burgundy colour — it seems like this could have worked very well with the greys in the new map and could have been a very distinctive accent colour. I also feel that the station dots have gone from being too big (on the old map) to too small and disconnected from the station names on the new.

Our rating: Professionally done, modern but perhaps altogether just a little too slick. Three-and-a-half-stars.

Source: SPT website

Official Map: Bus Transit of Spokane, Washington, 2012

February 9, 2012
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Well, it certainly didn’t take long for people to set me right after my blanket statement that bus maps are “just” boring old geographically-accurate road maps with routes on them. I’ve had a flood of submissions, comments and tweets on the subject, complete with links to some very interesting examples of bus-only maps.

This one, from the city of Spokane in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, definitely caught my eye. For a fairly small transit district, this map is very impressive and actually puts a lot of larger transit agencies to shame.

Have we been there? I’ve been through Spokane on road trips, but have never needed to catch a bus there.

What we like: Beautifully clear routes, with thickness of line serving as an indicator of frequency. Especially clever is the merging of two routes that travel along the same road into a combined thicker line to indicate that the two services together offer greater frequency along that corridor. While the map has been simplified, it still holds a strong relationship to geographical reality. The muted background colour and soft grey used for the underlying roads really allow the routes to stand out clearly. Comprehensive and easy to read legend.

What we don’t like: The insets for the Valley Transit Center and The Plaza Boarding Zones really need to be shown more clearly on the main map itself – it took me (a non-local) a few minutes of scanning the map to find their actual location. The dotted line used to denote non-stop service can be a little indistinct, especially on the pink Express routes.

Our rating: A surprisingly confident and well-executed map from a lesser-known transit district. Four stars!

Source: Spokane Transit website

Photo: Old Boston Subway Map

February 4, 2012
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Uncovered at Orient Heights station, photo from 2009. Note “Washington” station instead of Downtown Crossing, the entirely different alignment of the Orange Line to Forest Hills, no Red Line extension to Quincy and Braintree (and it ends at Harvard in the other direction). The “A” Green Line to Watertown is still in service, and the “E” goes all the  way to Arborway. Love the elegant simplicity to this, and the lovely crimson red used for the Red Line (which goes to Harvard, after all!).

Source: trevonhaywood2012/Flickr – link no longer active