Official Map: Métro de Montréal, Québec, Canada, 2012

January 31, 2012
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Requested by pomme-poire-peche

Montréal’s Metro map instantly stands out from the crowd  by virtue of its black background – a feature only rarely seen in transit maps. Although the idea of a subway serving Montréal was first tabled in the early 1900s, it wasn’t until 1966 that it finally opened.

Have we been there? No.

What we like: Graphically bold and clean. Black background and subdued colour for the waterways really allow the thick, colourful route lines to stand out. Really like the “coloured square” effect for interchange stations between the Métro and the commuter rail lines. The geography shown, while still based in reality, is abstract enough to work well with the bold route lines.

What we don’t like: I’m not a fan of the small caps type treatment for station names – it breaks up the names and looks awkward when placed in the coloured boxes at the ends of the lines. The north pointer and legend look unfortunately generic, while the placement of the elevator symbols is abysmal (pomme-poire-peche asked me to ignore these, as they apparently aren’t there on the maps in stations, but they’re kind of hard not to notice!). Some of the curves and angles on the commuter rail lines seem poorly chosen or drawn.

Our rating: I love it when a map is so distinctive that it couldn’t possibly be from anywhere else in the world than the city it represents – and this is definitely all Montréal’s. A few minor flaws detract from the overall quality, but this is better than the average map. Three-and-a-half stars.

Source: Official STM website

Official Map: Singapore MRT/LRT System Map, 2012

January 29, 2012
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Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system only opened in 1987, but has expanded greatly since then and now boasts 90 stations and almost 150 kilometres of lines. It is supplemented by the LRT, which is not a true light rail system, but is more like an automated people mover that serves the high density apartment blocks prevalent in land-poor Singapore. In earlier versions of the map, I believe that the stylised “S” logo in the background formed a rough analogy to the shape of the island of Singapore itself – with the addition of new lines, this doesn’t hold as true as before (with much of the North East Line now extending well into the “ocean”), but it’s still a distinctive graphic device to tie the map together.

Have we been there? No.

What we like: Spacious, clean, elegant layout. Distinctive sans serif typeface gives a unique look to the map – for once, Helvetica is nowhere to be seen.

What we don’t like: I’m not sure why the alphanumeric codes for each of the stations has to be included on the map (something to do with ticketing? Can anyone from Singapore enlighten me on this?), but they do end up adding a lot of visual clutter to an otherwise clean map, especially when a station has multiple codes. The two LRT loops in the north east of the map are too close to each other, making type from one run into the other. It looks like it could have been possible to space them a bit further apart by extending the main North East Line just a little further out.

Our rating: A confident, distinctive map that boasts its own look. While obviously bearing a London Underground map influence, it has moved beyond its inspiration to create something new and fresh. Four stars.

Source: Official SMRT website – link no longer active

Tutorial: Adobe Illustrator’s ‘Round Corners’ Effect and Transit Maps

January 28, 2012
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In my earlier post about drawing a transit map, I made mention of the fact that Adobe Illustrator’s “Round Corners” effect doesn’t work very well with multiple curves around a corner, such as parallel route lines changing direction together on a transit map.

This part of my post elicited a very interesting comment from Chris Helenius in Finland that there are ways to get matching curves around a corner when using the Round Corners effect. However, the method he shows is a workaround – he expands the appearance of the curve, then offsets the path the required distance. In practice, this is very similar to my approach of keeping a “master” library of curves that I insert where needed – both require some cutting and pasting of points and curves to achieve the final result.

What Chris’s method doesn’t recognise is that Adobe’s implementation of Rounded Corners is fundamentally flawed, and it’s a flaw that makes it impossible to achieve consistent nested curves.

As the diagram above shows, the problem comes from Adobe’s poorly implemented definition of “radius” in the Rounded Corner effect’s dialog box.

The dictionary definition of radius is, “a straight line from the centre to the circumference of a circle or sphere.” And that’s what I expect to be implemented when I set a value in the dialog box – make a curve with this radius from the centre point of the inferred circle. If this were true, you’d see curves like those shown in the second column of the diagram: three nicely nested curves at a radius of 10, 20 and 30 points, which look the same regardless of the angle between the lines when you started.

Instead, you get what happens in column three. For reasons known only to itself, Illustrator measures the value that is put into the dialog box from the original corner point (shown as the black lines in column three) that joins the line segments on the intended curve, not the centre point of the circle. In other words, this is not a true radius at all.

When the angle between the line segments is 90 degrees, things work as expected, because the mathematics works out the same regardless of where the “radius” is measured from. But look what happens when there’s a 135-degree angle. Instead of the outer curve having a radius to its centre point of 30 points (as input into the dialog box), it’s actually 72.46 points! Even worse, all three curves end up having completely different centre points (as indicated by the grey intersecting lines), so no amount of fiddling with values is ever going to get them to nest inside each other properly.

As you can see, entering the same set of values into the Round Corners dialog box produces vastly different results depending upon the angle between the line segments – this makes results impossible to predict and the effect totally useless when designing a transit map: what is a nice tight 30 point radius on one part of the map may become a loose 72 point radius in another, even though you asked for a 30 point radius both times. I’ll be sticking to my labour-intensive, but 100% accurate methods.

Note: this part of the tutorial is no longer true for users of Adobe Illustrator CC and above, as Adobe has integrated the excellent “Live Corners” tool into the program. See this post for more information.

Official Map: Boston MBTA Rapid Transit/Key Bus Routes Map, 2012

January 23, 2012
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I haven’t really looked at the Boston MBTA map since I was there for a few days in the middle of 2008, but I certainly don’t remember it looking as bad as this. I’ve always been mildly annoyed by the fact that not all the stations on the surface street sections of the Green Line are labelled, but my overall impression back then was of a solid, well-designed map.

Just a few short years later, well-meaning but poorly thought-out additions have reduced the map to the horrible mess we see here. And the word “addition” reveals the real cause of this map’s problems: new services have simply been slapped on top of the earlier map when it actually needed a full redesign to solve the problems that these additions created.

If you strip the map down, you can see how these problems multiply with the addition of each new service. The subway lines by themselves actually make a nice, well-designed diagram. Then the commuter rail routes were added: these still fit within the framework fairly well. Then the Silver Line – by now, the designer is struggling to make things fit, resulting in an incomprehensible maze of directional arrows to the west of South Station. Finally, the “key bus routes” have to be shoehorned into a map that was never originally designed to show them, resulting in the routes weaving uncertainly all over the map. Oh, and did I mention the ferry routes and the airport shuttle buses?

Have we been there? Yes, although I only used the “T” a couple of times, and only in the downtown area.

What we like: Ambitious scope to show different transit modes. Unfortunately, looks very amateur compared to some of the maps currently coming out of Europe. I don’t have a problem with the commuter rail lines not being shown along their entire length – they head a long way out and this is a map of Boston, not Massachusetts or New England!

What we don’t like: This is going to be a long list…

I really dislike the knobby, multi-armed Transfer Stations – South Station and Forest Hills look incredibly messy, while Haymarket’s angled bus stop circle clearly shows that the designer simply ran out of room and cheated to fit the station name in. Even worse are the transfer stations rotated to a random, non-45-degree angle (also cheating) to allow them to connect to a bus service (see Hynes, Coolidge Corner and Harvard Ave on the Green Line for examples).

The Silver Line is one hot mess. It’s not a subway line (it’s actually BRT), but is shown as one. It’s made up of four separate routes (SL 1 and 2 run to the east of South Station, SL 4 and 5 run to the west – with no direct interchange between the two sets of routes), but it’s almost impossible to decipher this on the map. As noted before, the directional arrows on the SL4/5 routes don’t really help at all. Lots of stops on SL1 and SL2 simply aren’t shown at all – not even a dot! But the bit I hate the most is where SL1 loops around the Logan Airport Terminals – the connecting line joins on against the directional flow of the arrows: hideously counterintuitive and ugly.

The less said about the presentation of the bus routes, the better. Cramped and ugly. The way the curve of the 32 doesn’t nestle into the curve of the commuter rail line to the south-west of Forest Hills catches my eye (in a bad way) every time.

My final major complaint is the representation of Boston’s geography – on a diagrammatic map like this, I’m almost never in favour of “realistic” representations of shorelines and rivers, seeing as they have to be seriously distorted to fit around the diagram anyway! I believe they should also be represented in a simplified form to add to the clarity of the map. Here, we have the seemingly farcical image of the F2 ferry passing over what looks like a spit of land to reach its destination in Quincy (it’s actually going under a bridge, but this map doesn’t draw that distinction at all).

Our rating: Well meaning, but seriously flawed. Needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. With the addition of the Silver Line, the centre of the city needs far more space given to it, while the edges can afford to be compressed a bit to compensate (look how much room the Braintree leg of the Red Line has, for example). One-and-a-half stars.

Source: Official MBTA website

Fantasy Map: Chicago “L” Overlaid On New York City

January 21, 2012
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A bit of whimsy for you today from Reddit, brought to my attention by Twitter user @GordonWerner. The “L” has been flipped both horizontally and vertically, then rotated to fit Manhattan’s street grid, but the scaling is accurate. It looks like The Loop is placed in the area directly below Central Park. A few things from this: it’s actually kind of scary how well this fits; and it’s astounding just how dense the New York subway’s lines really are (shown here in white).

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Source: r/transit on Reddit

Official Map: LVB, Leipzig, Germany, 2012

January 17, 2012
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In a way, this map of Leipzig reminds me quite a bit of Viteks Bariševs’ recently featured map of Riga: both feature an extensive tram/streetcar/bus network shown in a highly diagrammatic form. However, this highly detailed map goes one step further in that it also shows frequency of services. The thicker the route line, the more often it arrives, regardless of travel mode. This solution is so devastatingly simple, it’s a wonder it isn’t used more often on maps – frequency is definitely a huge factor in deciding whether or not to use transit.

Have we been there? No.

What we like: Even though the map is very complex and dense, there’s still a good hierarchy in the information: the tram lines are given brighter colours to allow them to stand out from the less colourful purple and grey bus lines. Regional train services are relegated to thin black lines. The circular treatment of the lines around the city centre is simply beautiful and elegant: there’s no doubt as to what the most important part of the map is. Labels are all set horizontally for easy reading.

What we don’t like: While an amazing achievement, the map is perhaps too informationally dense for quick scanning of the network, or for casual users. The placement of the grid at the very top layer of the map becomes visually distracting when it passes over elements like terminus names and tram lines. The grid is hardly the most important part of the map and should be placed behind many of the objects shown, not in front. The organic treatment of lakes and other bodies of water is at odds with the strict diagrammatic layout of everything else on the map.

Our rating: Informationally rich and quite beautiful. Let down a bit by the strange grid overlay and blobby looking lakes. Four stars, but definitely a map that’s meant for deep perusal rather than a quick overview.

Source: Official LVB website

Unofficial Map: Unified Transit Map of Riga, Latvia by Viteks Bariševs

January 13, 2012
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Yesterday morning, I got an interesting email from Viteks Bariševs in response to my assertion that transit maps rarely show completely different transit modes (bus and rail, mainly) on the same map due to their differing natures. He is working on a totally unified transit map for Riga – and that includes showing a staggering 53 bus routes, 19 trolleybus routes and 9 tram routes – a monumental task!

His map certainly looks impressive, showing a dense network of routes and stations. Interesting aspects include the inner city inset, which switches to a traditional geographically-accurate map with numbered stops. The legend then cleverly tells you at which of these stops different routes call at, thus preventing the central part of the map from becoming a twisting spaghetti-like maze of route lines.

I’m not entirely convinced by Viteks’ method of differentiating between different services by using white dashes of different lengths within each route line (as seen in the detail image): it interrupts the flow of the routes, and can look a little messy when multiple lines are running parallel. My preferred method would be differing line thicknesses (probably tram as thickest, trolleybus as a line the same thickness, but with a solid white line down the centre, then buses as thinner lines). Failing that, you could simply rely on the letter prefix on each route to clue people in as to what type of service that line represents.

If the representation of all of Riga’s transit wasn’t enough, Viteks has also produced a map of night bus services that is nicely overlaid on a ghosted-back version of the daytime services, allowing travellers to relate one set of services to another.

Viteks has big plans for his map, telling me that he hopes to have it become the official map for Riga in the future. It certainly shows a lot of promise, even from these few preview images. Click through on the source link below to view more images from this intriguing project.

Source: Viteks Bariševs’ Riga Transit Facebook photo album

Unofficial Map: Paris RER Line B as the Eiffel Tower by Sonoko Hagiwara

January 12, 2012
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Words cannot express just how much I love this cleverly thought of, deftly executed and incredibly cute rendering of Paris’ RER Line B as the Eiffel Tower. Hagiwara has drawn her inspiration from the official RER line diagram, with the bifurcation of the line becoming the “legs” of the tower. Almost seems like a clever advertisement for the RER, and only took her 20 minutes to execute!

Source: Sonoko Hagiwara – link no longer active

Official Map: Sao Paulo Metropolitan Transport Network, 2012

January 10, 2012
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Unusually, this map from the Brazilian metropolis of Sao Paulo shows services offered by completely different transportation companies on the same map. To my mind, this type of integrated map needs to be used more often – travelers don’t necessarily care who offers the service, they just want to know if they can get from point A to point B.

Have we been there? No.

What we like: Comprehensive and all-encompassing. Great legend, even if it takes up more than half the sheet of paper it is printed on. I love the line names for the CPTM services – precious stones. It makes for some lovely and unusual colours on the map itself as well. Bilingual legend.

What we don’t like: Seems very cramped in places. The spacing on the Diamond line to the west of the city is far tighter than on the lines to the east. The grey drop shadow on the interchange stations (seemingly indicating light coming from the top left of the map) is ugly and unnecessary.

The whole thing is very busy, with dots everywhere – blue dots, green dots, white dots with green outlines, dots with an “E” in them – all of which need you to refer to the legend to determine their meaning. The need to show the logos of all the service providers on the map itself just adds to the visual noise.

Some routes seem unnecessarily complex for a diagrammatic map – the Yellow Line weaves all over the place, and why does the Lilac line need to jog northwards after it connects with the Emerald line at Santo Amaro?

Our rating: A comprehensive look at transit in a huge city, but a bit of a mess, really. Two-and-a-half-stars.

Source: Official Sao Paulo Metro website

Historical Map: Harry Beck’s 1961 Victoria Line Tube Map Proposal

January 8, 2012
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It seems I’m having a London Underground kind of week…

When people ask me what my favourite version of the London Tube Map is, I always show them this.

By 1961, Harry Beck was no longer responsible for producing the Tube map, it having been forcibly passed on to Harold Hutchison. However, more out of hope than anything else, he continued to produce new mockups of the map which he passed on to London Transport for consideration, including this beautiful one from 1961. It was returned to Beck with a curt letter in December 1961, making it obvious that London Transport had no intention of rehiring him to work on future maps.

Have we been there? Yes.

What we like: A simply gorgeous hand rendering of the Tube Map. The stand out element to me is Beck’s masterful treatment of the proposed Victoria Line, which runs at a perfect 45-degree diagonal from end-to-end. He had to rebuild the entire map to achieve this, but the end result is worth the effort. Compare this treatment to today’s Tube Map, where the Victoria Line runs at unconvincing angles to fit into the existing layout.

What we don’t like: Strangely, the Piccadilly Line spur to Aldwych runs inside and then across the main line, when it would be simpler to run it straight down on the right. An unusually complicated detail from a man so normally driven to simplify and clarify.

Our rating: The apotheosis of the Beck style. Almost everything is reduced to its simplest form. His ability to take apart his own work and put it back together in a more compelling form has never been better shown. 5 stars.

Source: Scanned from my personal copy of “Mr. Beck’s Map” by Ken Garland, Capital Transport Publishing, 1994