Historical Map: Denver RTD Bus Network, 1977

October 2, 2019
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A great example of late 1970s American transit map design from Denver’s Regional Transportation District (RTD) with thick, chunky route lines, minimalist design sensibilities and tightly letter-spaced sans serif headings.

The map has the potential to get messy really quickly, but it’s actually all handled rather deftly and cleanly. Colour-coding differentiates between different service types (local, express, circulator and regional), and route numbers and road names are placed inside the thick route lines, which generally makes them fairly easy to follow across the map. Some of the routes do get pretty squiggly and overly detailed, but overall, this is a very credible effort at showing a comprehensive overview of a large bus network. Also, RTD is still using the exact same logo today, some 40-odd years later. Awesome.

Three-and-a-half stars out of five.

Source: Denver Public Library Digital Collections

Revised Unofficial Map: Copenhagen Rapid Transit Map by Kristoffer Bæk and Pasha Omelekhin

October 1, 2019
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Sometime after I reviewed Kristoffer’s original unified Copenhagen-area transit map (January 2019, 4 stars), he began to collaborate with Pasha Omelekhin, a designer probably most well-known for his alternative Berlin map. They’ve just released their revised map, and it’s really quite wonderful.

Designwise, it’s definitely an evolution of Kristoffer’s original map, but I can see where the collaboration has resulted in marked improvements to the map. The interchanges have a more consistent design now, one which very clearly shows the user that they’ll have to transfer between the Metro and S-Tog. The transfer lines have that very in-vogue Russian design trope of using a gradient between the two route line colours — in general, I think this element works better on bolder lines so that the gradient can be seen easily; these slender joining lines seem to be a bit thin for the effect to work well.

However, I do really like the subtle use of slightly darker variant of the route line colour around the white station dots, which really lets them pop out of the route line without being as overpowering as a black keyline or similar.

Another major improvement is the use of official route line colours throughout: Kristoffer gave new colours to the Metro lines on his previous attempt, which is a bit of a no-no. Here, simply casing the lines gives enough transit mode differentiation for the similar colours to co-exist on the same map.

Some other notes: geography is handled nicely, as is the indication of Copenhagen’s central core (very handy for tourists). Inclusion of more regional rail is good, though the spatial relationships on the outer edges of the map get distorted somewhat with their addition (Roskilde is further west than the end of the S-Tog network in real life). I kind of miss the little point of interest icons from Kristoffer’s previous map, though I can see why they’ve been omitted.

The final word: An evolution, but a good one. I think Pasha has brought a lot of design discipline and expertise to Kristoffer’s original concept, and the results speak for themselves. Four-and-a-half stars out of five.

(And is that a ghostly Little Mermaid poking in from the right edge of the map?)

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Source: A new rapid transit map of Copenhagen

Historical Map: Tourist’s Trolley Map of St. Louis and Environs, 1915

September 27, 2019
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A fairly crudely-drawn map of St. Louis’ extensive streetcar network, reaching far past the city limits to the cities of Florissant and St. Charles, as well as to the pleasures of the Meramec Highlands and Lake Park. Like many maps of St. Louis from this period, the map is oriented with north to the right so that “downtown” is literally at the bottom of the map.

Of particular note is the message at the bottom of the map, proudly proclaiming, “The ratio of fatalities in 1915 was one fatality to 89 million Passengers. A STREET CAR IS A PRETTY SAFE PLACE.” Using the total annual ridership of 356,814,595 passengers, it’s pretty simple to work out that this equates to four deaths, which is pretty safe, all things considered. Interestingly, there’s no mention of injuries, which could have been a much more substantial number.

Source: UMSL Digital Library

Submission – Fantasy Map: North East Overground (neo) Bus Network, Newcastle upon Tyne by Owain

August 30, 2019
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Submitted by Owain, who says:

Love your blog. I’d really like to get your thoughts and, of course, a rating on a transit map I have created using Adobe Photoshop. It is for a fictional brand I have created called ‘neo’ (North East Overground) which ties together real express bus routes which radiate from Newcastle opon Tyne. The bus routes I have tied together under the ‘neo’ banner are a hotchpotch of different operators, ticketing and timetables, so my aim for the map was one single cohesive brand which hopefully screams simplicity.

Transit Maps says:

This is very clean and legible, Owain – nicely done! Some obvious influences would seem to be the Newcastle Metro map (the grey circle indicating the city centre) and the Manchester tram map (ticks coming out of station circles to point at labels), but you’ve given everything your own twist as well so it doesn’t look derivative. The nested curves where the “C” and “D” lines diverge in Newcastle could be drawn a little better, but everything else looks very technically sound.

The various rivers are a great way to divide the map up into regions and to quickly show the scale of the network, though I think I’d like to see curves where the River Wear changes direction, rather than hard 90-degree angles.

A legend for the symbols would be handy: you should always make everything on a map explicit, instead of assuming people know what each icon means. And although I think the map overall is great, it does take up a lot of vertical space: I think that a more compact version would be very interesting to see.

Our final word: There’s a stop called “Pity Me”! Executed nicely in a style that plays nicely with the existing Metro branding, though I think it could be compressed into a more convenient shape as an alternate version.

See: Owain’s Behance project page

Submission – Unofficial Future Map: San Diego Trolley by Ted Rosenbaum

August 28, 2019
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Submitted by Ted, who says:

When the Mid-Coast extension opens in a couple years, San Diego’s going to need a new trolley map. Their current map has some odd angles and no references to the city’s geography, so I took a shot at a new diagram that fixes those issues. I used big looping curves to fit San Diego’s more languid style, and make the connecting services more explicit. Would love to get your thoughts on my attempt.

Transit Maps says:

An interesting take on San Diego’s trolley network from Ted, which is quite good for the most part. I do like the wide, languid curves in the outer parts of the map, though it’s a bit less successful downtown where it makes a bit of a “rugby ball” shape. This makes the Green/Blue line interchange at 12th & Imperial a bit confusing with overlapping route lines, and hides the fact that the Blue and Orange lines take an L-shaped route along Park Blvd and C Street, something the official map handles pretty well.

Inclusion of connecting bus services to the airport is a nice touch, as is including the regional rail services (Coaster and the Pacific Surfliner). I do believe that the Pacific Surfliner stopped calling at Sorrento Valley last October, so that needs to be fixed on the map. Also, I’d call it the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner, rather than using the somewhat obscure LOSSAN name. While LOSSAN manages the service, it’s branded as an Amtrak route and promoted to the public as such. It’s also a little unfortunate that all the route lines in this part of the map are shades of blue, especially as they also cross over each other.

Inclusion of the coastline and the US/Mexico border is a good idea, though I’d like to see the Pacific Ocean join up to both of the bays, rather than have them look like separate, unconnected bodies of water. Easier with Dan Diego Bay than Mission Bay, but I think it’d be worth it.

Submission – Unofficial Map: Circumvesuviana Lines by Harry

August 27, 2019
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Submitted by Harry, who says:

Hi Cam – I’m a big fan of your blog, been reading for years. I’ve always wanted to try designing a transit map, but hadn’t found a good system to start with (I live in NYC, which is both daunting and already done well)… until recently! I visited Sorrento in June, and had the chance to ride the Circumvesuviana from Naples to Sorrento and round-trip from Sorrento to Pompeii. Something about it captured my imagination, and since it only has 5 lines it seemed like a great first system to map. On top of that, I couldn’t find a single diagrammatic map of the entire Circumvesuviana anywhere online. There are maps that include the parts in Naples – you featured a great one in 2014 – but none of them extend to Sorrento or the other CV destinations. The official site has very low-res strip maps, Italian Wikipedia has an MS Paint sketch of the routes, and… that was it.

So here’s my take! I’d love to hear what you think, and what I can improve on. My initial idea was to base the design on intersecting circles – the blue line circling the Bay of Naples, the red/green and yellow lines in concentric rings around Vesuvius – but I couldn’t quite get the Linea 3 pink line to fit, and switched to straight lines at 45/90 degree angles. The primary goal was to map the CV lines, so I included other rail options but only within the CV map extent.

For the color scheme, there wasn’t much to go off of on the CV website. I wanted something specific to the region, so I picked colors from a photo I took of Roman frescos while I was there, and used those – it’s a little muted, but I think that’s okay since for the most part the lines are only competing with the regional rail, which I have in grey.

I debated a few different ways of showing Vesuvius, and kind of wanted to do a top down view – I ended up going with the profile, as that was the easiest to trace the shape of and have it look okay given my lack of freehand drawing experience in Illustrator.

Before I started on the diagram, I exported the routes from OpenStreetMap to Illustrator as a reference. It turned out they weren’t consistently tagged (and in a few cases tracks were missing), so that led down a rabbit hole of using Google Translate to read Italian Wikipedia and railfan sites (lestradeferrate.it was very helpful!) to correctly map out the routes and stations. Probably more research than I needed to do, but the track map was a helpful reference while creating the map!

Overall I had a lot of fun putting this together – and have a few ideas for expansions (including the metros in central and eastern Naples) or companion pieces (the SITA bus which runs from Sorrento down the Amalfi coast also does not appear to have a map).

Transit Maps says:

This is a great effort for a first attempt at a transit map, Harry, and a fun project to sink your teeth into. I rode the Circumvesuviana from Naples to the Roman ruins at Pompeii and Herculaneum way back in 2003, the day after a massive transit strike hit the region, so that was memorable!

Everything is nice and clear, and the spacing between stations is excellent throughout, though I’d probably like to see the ferry terminals have their own labels or be placed closer to their respective railway stations. While I can see that they’re ever so slightly outside the area covered by this map, leaving the destinations that can be reached by ferry from Naples itself seems unfortunate. On that transit strike day, I took a very worthwhile trip from Naples to Capri, but that’s not shown as an option on this map at all.

The two unlabelled grey stations on the blue Sorrento line are a little strange. If they’re closed with no chance of being reopened in the immediate future (like Pozzano will be), then it’s probably best just to omit them.

I think the silhouette of Vesuvius is fine: the shape is very distinctive and recognisable, and it more immediately says “big volcano” than a top-down view would.

One thing I’m interested in is your line numbering for the CV lines: you only give the short Napoli to San Giorgio branch a line number (Linea 3), and from what I can see online, that’s not actually correct. The website of the CV’s operator, EAV, gives these line designations:

  • Linea 1 – Napoli to Sorrento
  • Linea 4 – Napoli to Poggiomarino
  • Linea 6 – Napoli to Sarno
  • Linea 8 – Three branches: Napoli to Acerra; Napoli to Baiano; the branch to San Giorgio

Colours are a bit vague, but Google Maps assigns them thus:

  • Linea 1 – black
  • Linea 4 – green (as yours)
  • Linea 6 – red (as yours)
  • Linea 8 to Acerra and Baiano – yellow (as yours)
  • Linea 8 to San Giorgio – purple (a little more muted than your pink)

Apart from that, there’s just a couple of minor typographical errors: “statzione” instead of “stazione”, for example.

Our final word: A really solid effort that could just be tightened up a bit more here and there. Consistency in naming the CV lines would be good. Three stars!

Historical Map: Proposal for Rapid Transit in Pittsburgh, October 1973

August 6, 2019
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A map presented as part of an overview of future rapid transit prepared by the Port Authority of Allegheny County. See the whole document here.

It’s a pretty basic thing, designed in that chunky 1970s style, but it’s interesting to compare it to what Pittsburgh has ended up building. Solid orange lines are proposed express commuter bus services, while dashed orange lines represent fixed guideway lines. If the lines are cased in black, then they are running on exclusive right-of-way. A lot of similarities can be seen here with modern-day Pittsburgh’s system of busways (some of which were funded but not built in 1973) and light rail, though they’re not identical by any means.

Ticked black lines represent commuter rail services from surrounding urban areas, which even the document itself seems to hold very little faith in, saying: “… opportunities may exist locally for revival of commuter trains on a limited basis between cities along river valleys.” Hardly a ringing endorsement! The Port Authority did operate its PATrain service between Pittsburgh’s B&O Terminal and Versailles via McKeesport from 1975 to 1989, but ridership declined sharply in the early 1980s.

The final word: Chunky and colourful, this serves as a nice accompanying graphic for the text in the brochure, but not much else. Fun to compare it to today’s network. Two-and-a-half stars.

Source: WESA 90.5FM

Official Map: Addis Ababa Light Rail, Ethiopia, 2019

August 2, 2019
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A fairly bare bones effort, probably located at the Lem Hotel station as it gets called out with a “You Are Here” red dot and is also named on the map itself.

Strangely, the map makes the somewhat odd decision to not show the blue Line 2 where it runs concurrently with the green Line 1, which makes it look like Line 1 has two separate unconnected parts. The “rotating arrows” transfer station markers at St. Lucia and Stadium stations somehow manage to be less prominent than the normal station dots, which is fairly counter-intuitive. There’s decent integration of the Amharic script for bilingual station labels, but the map’s legend is only in Amharic (fortunately, the legend isn’t really necessary for a map this simple).

At first, I thought this was a simplified diagram of the network, but a look at a geographical map of the network (below, from Wikipedia) shows that it’s actually a good representation of the real thing.

The final word: Very basic, but certainly usable. 2 stars.

Source: r/mapporn – Reddit

Historical Map: 1970 Map Showing Proposed Rio de Janeiro Metro in 1990

August 1, 2019
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A map from 1970, somenine years before the Metro opened, showing what the network was meant to look like in 1990. As things have turned out, not quite.

Although the initial segment and the “Linha Prioritária” correspond very closely to the current Metro Line 1, and parts of the dashed “Linha 1” on the map correspond somewhat to the current Line 2, the remainder is very different indeed. A crossing to Niteroi on the other side of Guanabara Bay? An extension from Saens Peña out to Jacarepagua, and an orbital line from there to Penha? And the Metro in 2019 only has 41 stations compared to the projected 54… a very different future!

Source: National Archives of Brazil/Flickr

Historical Map: Compañía General de Ferrocarriles Catalanes, 1954

July 29, 2019
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Here’s a beautiful map from 1954, showing the lines of the Compañía General de Ferrocarriles Catalanes (CGFC), the predecessor of today’s Llobregat–Anoia commuter rail line.

The map is mainly notable for its restrained use of the four colours available to it: black line work with blue, red and yellow all performing precisely one function each.

I also enjoy the economical depiction of Barcelona, which is represented solely by Montjuic, the port area and the towering Columbus Monument. Each of the major towns on the route gets a notable building as well — although the monastery at Montserrat is high above the town itself, connected to it by the famous cable car. Suria and Sallent would seem to be represented by their salt mines, major reasons for these towns to even have a rail connection.

Top marks for the lovely ornate north pointer, in perspective to boot!

Source: Terminus CET/Twitter