Along with a major service revision in December 2019 that – amongst other things –closed the Almaden Shuttle light rail line, San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) also took the opportunity to introduce a new light rail map, shown here.
While it’s nothing outstanding, it’s clean, clear and easy to understand – which actually puts it ahead of quite a lot of other maps out there. I would like to see another use of the big curve on the Orange Line between Alder and Cropley somewhere else on the map: it just looks a little odd being the only instance on the map. As riders on the Orange Line are required to transfer to get downtown on the Blue or Green lines, it could be helpful for the map to indicate preferred transfer stations to make that as seamless as possible. Is Old Ironsides better, or is Champion? Or one of the others?
Best practices would also ask for the “O”, “G” and “B” bullets to be repeated at the ends of their respective lines to aid colour-blind users, and listing each line’s terminus stations in the legend would also be helpful. Speaking of the legend, I don’t see a single instance of the bike lockers icon on the actual map – oops!
Our final word: The previous VTA light rail map had a lovely little tilt to the left which mirrored the real world alignment of the lines from downtown up to Tasman, which I do miss on this new version. However, this one is cleaner and simpler, so I think it’s an improvement overall. 3 stars.
Here’s a very handsome little map showing the lines of the Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway from sometime in the late 1930s. By this point in time however, almost all of the routes were run by buses, making the name of the company somewhat ironic. Just two streetcar lines remain: Fields Corner to Quincy (with branches from there to Quincy Point or Houghs Neck), and Sullivan Square to Stoneham.
The map itself is drawn in a lovely, ornate illustrative style that was very popular at the time with scrollwork around the map’s legend, a decorative border and a beautiful compass rose. The use of blue for both water and terrain is rather clever — the differing textures used allows the two to be told apart easily and also makes the black route lines and text stand out from the background better.
This particular copy of the map has had some additions penciled in by an unknown hand — a whole new line from Taunton to Norton, and some directional arrows along routes on the right half of the map, almost as if someone was planning a journey to take advantage of the $1 Ride-all-Day far advertised in the copy below the map.
A map from on what looks like a presentation board showing the mid-1970s version of the Chicago Central Area Transit Plan. Initially planned as a whole new system of subway lines to entirely replace the Loop in downtown Chicago in the late 1960s, rising costs caused the program to be split into parts: the “Core Plan” seen here, with the balance to be built later. As it happened, none of it was ever actually constructed.
The three components of the “Core Plan” — the Franklin Street Subway (red), the Monroe Street Distributor (blue) and a small linking section of the Randolph Line (green) — were chosen because they could be built with a minimum of disruption and provided the best integration with the existing system.
The map itself has a nice clean architectural feeling to it, perfectly suited to the presentation format it was intended for. One odd bit of 1970s styling is the use of lower case for the extant line names — “dan ryan”, “douglas”, etc.
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I absolutely love this almost abstract representation of the Gotthardbahn from a Swiss advertising brochure from 1957. Just major cities, the distinctive loops and spirals of the line (described in detail in this post from 2014) and the famous 15-kilometre-long Gotthard Tunnel shown illustratively cutting through a massive mountain.
Transit maps for Naples have been decidedly average and piecemeal in the past (see here and here for past reviews), so it’s lovely to see this new official map presenting a fully integrated view of rapid transit in and around the city.
Designed by Andrea Spinosa of CityRailways — whose Atlas of Italian Rail Transit poster we reviewed back in 2014 — this is definitely a huge step in the right direction, being much better designed and clearer to read than previous efforts. The map also finally makes official a unified line numbering system that was first proposed in 1997, and groups the suburban rail services together by colours — the Circumvesuviano lines are all tones of red, for example. The city’s funicular railways are designated by letters (A, B, C and D) to set them apart from the numbered rail lines. There’s also good differentiation between the different modes of interchange: direct interchanges, “out of station” interchanges and even via city escalator. Best of all, it seems to be future-proofed, with under-construction lines clearly laid out as an integral part of the design.
The final word: Sooooooo much better than anything Naples has had before, and really quite lovely. Four stars!
A design hinted at by Jug Cerovic after last year’s Transit Mapping Symposium, and seen in a photograph earlier this year has finally been made official. Here’s the new Singapore MRT map, currently only installed at the new Thomson-East Coast Line stations (Woodlands North, Woodlands and Woodlands South) but planned to be rolled out to the entire network. Of note is that the process for this redesign began way back in 2015 with a lot of public engagement and testing of prototypes — new transit maps don’t just happen overnight!
The first thing to notice is that the Circle Line is now actually a circle, which works fairly well for the most part: the stations along its arc are spaced out relatively evenly, and it seems to create a bit more space for the busier central part of the map. This allows a rudimentary representation of the Singapore River and Marina Bay to be added, along with little icons of sights in the vicinity. It’s a nice usability touch to help tourists orient themselves on an otherwise fairly featureless map. The prototype seen in the earlier photo showed the Botanic Gardens as a lonely green “parkland” area, but that seems to have been deleted for the final version.
Also interesting is that Singapore is now properly presented as an island, though a pretty roughly-drawn, blobby one that I don’t find particularly attractive. In reality, the eastern part of the green East-West Line out to Pasir Ris and Changi Airport shadows the coastline pretty closely the whole way: the map makes it look like there’s a giant empty “transit desert” in the island’s south-east quadrant! The addition of Sentosa Island and the connections from HarbourFront station are very welcome, however. Jurong Island doesn’t seem to rate, though… it can hang out with Tasmania and New Zealand as islands that get left off maps.
The presentation of the new Thomson-East Coast Line is perhaps problematic… it’s basically shown as if it was complete, without the usual dashed/faded/hollow line to indicate future sections under construction. Instead, all the stations that have yet to be opened have a brown “U/C” — for “Under Construction” — appended to their label. However, this code isn’t explained anywhere in the legend, which doesn’t seem very helpful to me. I wonder whether the maps are going to be updated by simply placing white stickers over the “U/C” labels as new stations come on-line?
Other quick notes: Line numbering seems to be de-emphasized in favour of line names and destinations now, with the numbered bullets at the termini much smaller when compared to previous maps. The numbered station “caplets” (to use official LTA terminology) are probably the best executed example of this style in the world: clear but distinctively designed, and able to handle multi-line interchange stations with aplomb. Addition of the future Jurong Region line looks like it’s going to be problematic within this framework.
The final word: A considered evolution of the existing house style, and one that’s definitely growing on me. I wish the island itself had a slightly more refined shape, but you can’t have everything. Three-and-a-half stars.
I’ve designed this schematic map of what Victoria’s passenger rail network looked like in 1928. It was absolutely huge, with 114 lines and 1,185 stations.
The map is built around the seven main lines (thicker 15pt lines) with branch and other lines thinning out (10pt) to create a basic visual heirarchy. This emphasises services rather than infrastructure, as it also shows where passengers were required to interchange.
Line groups are in one of six colours according to the main line to which its timetable was aligned. For example, the Clarkfield – Lancefield Line is shown in the colour of the Bendigo Line because passengers wishing to travel on this service would take a Bendigo train to Clarkfield and change to another train bound for Lancefield. The timetables of both lines were harmonised so that waiting times were minimised.
The only exception to these rules is the Overland or ‘Adelaide Express’ as it was previously known. This is the single brown line that extends west along the Serviceton Line from Flinders Street Station. The reason for showing this separately is that it had a different stopping pattern specific to this service, and was designated as a separate line by VR (unlike the other interstate trains to Albury, Mount Gambier and Pinaroo).
It’s worth noting that despite the comprehensive scale of the network, many of these lines only had a couple of trains per week or were part of goods trains. The timetables of the period show how low the service levels were for most of these areas.
Transit Maps says:
Now this is the kind of epic historical mapping project that I can get behind! Philip’s done a great job of clearly and concisely showing this sprawling network – the decision to use just a few colours to denote the main trunk lines and their branch lines works spectacularly well, stopping the map from looking too crazy or multi-coloured. I also really like the light grey suburban lines sitting below the main route lines, providing valuable context without being too overpowering or distracting.
I’d perhaps like to see the labelling a little bigger: my own experience tells me that on massive maps like this it’s important to get type as large as you can, especially if you’re selling prints! I’d also be interested in seeing a version with coastline and the border with New South Wales, as quite a few stations (while nominally “Victorian”) are north of that boundary, and just one station – Pinnaroo – in South Australia. Showing borders could help hold the composition of the map together and provide some geographical context, but the schematic distortion may also be too great to allow this to be done convincingly.
There’s also a few minor errors here and there – the end of the suburban line at Hurstbridge extends past the terminus station dot; and the 90-degree curves between Murtoa and Jung aren’t nested properly, to name two that quickly stood out to me.
Head on over to Philip’s blog for more detail on the making of the map – a really interesting read.
These are two maps I made for a class where I’m proposing a trans-national maglev through what I’m calling the “Greater Northeast Corridor.” Totally unrealistic, I know, but I’d love to get your opinion on the map!
Transit Maps says:
Oh, I do like this, Adam! When you have proposed travel times of just 18 minutes between Philadelphia and New York (as just one example), the rapid transit diagram design metaphor works pretty much perfectly, and you’ve executed things very nicely indeed. The tilted rectangle looks great, though I probably would have moved Montreal to be the last station along the top edge, rather than the first station heading downwards along the left side – it just marries up a bit better with the geographical map (which is also nicely executed) and the idea than Canada is “above” the United States.
The inclusion of connecting local services in each city is a nice touch, although it seems odd to include Canada’s Via Rail and not Amtrak as well. Surely the maglev system hasn’t supplanted it completely? New Haven should also have a CTRail logo, right? Also, the legend for the map has a dashed line for future planned routes, but that style of line doesn’t appear on the map at all: a minor nitpick.
Our final word: As Adam says, it’s highly implausible that something like this would ever get built, but at least we can dream with this great map!
Visit the Transit Maps print store for a wide selection of original map designs and lovingly restored reproductions of vintage maps.
Transit Maps previously reviewed Blue Crow’s London Underground Architecture and Design Map back in 2017, and they’ve just released two new maps in the series celebrating Paris and New York’s transit systems (there’s also another map in the series for Moscow).
As before, the maps are simple but elegant in their execution, with a geographical map of the system on one side and the explanatory text and photos on the other. They come in handsome slip covers: I particularly like the die-cut Métro logo (based off one found at Franklin D. Roosevelt station) on the Paris cover.
Understandably, the text of each entry has to be kept brief because of space limitations (even more so for the Paris edition because of its need for English and French translation), but there’s always enough to attract the reader’s interest. One could certainly imagine a day spent in either of these cities finding the treasures described within. There’s a wide variety of architecture and art included ranging from all time periods, so there’s something for everyone!
As with the London edition, perhaps the only fault with these maps is that there’s not enough of a link between the two sides: the map and the text almost seem to exist as two disparate elements – slightly larger station labels on the map are the only indication that there’s accompanying text on the reverse side. However, it’s not a deal breaker in any way: if you’re planning a trip to New York or Paris and have any interest in the art, architecture or history of their transit systems, I’d definitely recommend picking up a copy!
Maps at Blue Crow’s website (UK pricing): New York | Paris
Maps on Amazon (affiliate links, US pricing): New York | Paris
A handsome birds-eye map of the extensive interurban electric railway network extending from Vancouver as far away as Chilliwack. An inset map shows the lines on Vancouver Island, though not terribly efficiently, as much space is devoted to showing the power transmission lines from the Jordan River power house.
There’s lots of great little details on the map, like little interurban trains running along the route lines, steam trains shown on the main line and busy docks and smoke stacks (always an indicator of industry and progress on these old maps) in and around Vancouver. My favourite bit is the way the mountains obscure the route line between Sumas and Sardis in the bottom right of the map — a lovely bit of pseudo-dimensionality that sells the “birds-eye” aspect of the map wonderfully.
Check out the source link at the bottom of the post to see the map in high-resolution, as well as the rest of the informational booklet that the map was featured in.
The final word: It’s a pity that this example of the map is in such poor physical condition (faded inks, tears and creases), because I’d put it in the Transit Mapsvintage maps print collection in a heartbeat otherwise. Rather wonderful. 4 stars!
