I missed this when it was released yesterday, but those TriMet designers (who really do seem to have too much time on their hands!) have released another mash-up map, this time riffing off the (in)famous 1970s New York Subway diagram by Massimo Vignelli.
It’s probably the best one so far, mimicking the style almost perfectly. If you’re going to do a homage, you may as well go all in, and that’s exactly what’s been done here!
There’s some great little touches like the reworked TriMet logo and the way that all the services get three-letter codes (the familiar MAX and WES, but also PAT for Portland Aerial Tram, and PSC for Portland Street Car) to emulate the three-letter services of the New York Subway – IRT, IND and BMT. There’s even a subtle “folded paper map” texture, which is just lovely.
The final word: Almost perfect! Some of the added geography is a little too fussy to be truly Vignelli-esque (Oswego Lake is okay, but Johnson Creek is a bit much), but that’s a truly minor nitpick. 4.5 stars.
This was found via the /r/BayArea subreddit. It appears to be an authentic transit map from September 1981 still hanging in the 12th Street Oakland City Center BART station! It’s published by an entity I’ve never heard of called the “Regional Transit Association.” On your blog I’ve previously seen a very clumsy and messy map that attempted to show the myriad transit systems of the Bay, including rail and connecting buses. This is a cleaner, very diagrammatical map that limits itself to rail and some of the major buses that are either very frequent or provide a key connection to areas not served by BART. The wide lines remind me of the Washington Metrorail map as well. The Bay Area would be served well by a modernized version of the map as there is none today that cleanly shows a comprehensive transit network. Would love to get your thoughts.
Transit Maps says:
This “fat line” style of transit diagram was very much in vogue in the late 1970s/early 1980s, so it’s really no surprise to find some similarities between this map and the (slightly earlier) Washington Metro map. For me at least, there’s also a little bit of the original Boston MBTA spider map here, especially in the way that the branches of the Muni streetcar lines are treated – looking a lot like the simplified branches of the Green Line in Boston.
Handel Gothic, the typeface used for the map’s title (and groovy logo) is a little at odds with the more restrained “minimalist” Helvetica employed elsewhere, but it was a popular display typeface at the time, often used to invoke a “futuristic” feeling. Note especially the ligature made out of the “NN” in “CONNECTIONS” – now there’s some great early 80s typography!
The map itself is an interesting historical record, showing BART’s extent in 1981 (only built to Daly City down the peninsula, for example) and the “Caltrans Peninsula Train”, which is Caltrain in everything but name. Many of these regional connections are very similar to what still exists today, which is interesting to see.
Designwise, it’s a bit uneven – it has some nicely simplified route lines and clear labelling, but the coastline of the Bay is way too fussy and detailed, especially the north-eastern part. The way the green Santa Clara County Transit line gets pushed out of alignment by the SamTrans line at Menlo Park is pretty sloppy. The inset for downtown San Francisco doesn’t really do that good of a job at clarifying things: one feels that all the empty space in the Pacific Ocean could have been better used to enlarge the inset and make it more useful.
The last word: A great historical document, although the design work is a little less polished than it could have been. It definitely seems to be emulating other transit maps of the period, though with perhaps slightly less effect. Still a pretty solid three stars.
Hey! I made this map of a system for Kuwait City, where I grew up. It has elements from the few official plans that have been made public, but with a greater focus on high density immigrant communities who would benefit significantly from an expansion in public transit. I experimented with a dark background, but this worked best.
Transit Maps says:
Nice work, Rahul! I agree that a lighter background works better here, though there could perhaps be just a little more contrast between the land and the sea. The proposed network is represented cleanly, and seems to map fairly well to the real-life layout of Kuwait City (at least from what I can see with a quick look at Google Maps!).
I do like the interesting and unique interchange symbol, and the bilingual station labels are handled well throughout. I do think that Rahul needs to add line numbers or letters to his coloured bullets and add those bullets to the ends of the lines on the map for better accessibility. As is often the case, Rahul’s Red and Green lines appear extremely similar for colour-blind users and there’s nothing on the map itself to help such users distinguish between them. Adding the relevant terminus station names for each line to the legend would also help a bit here.
Finally, I really, really like Rahul’s proposed Metro logo, which riffs rather wonderfully off Kuwait’s flag. Another in the endless line of variations on the humble letter “M”!
See also: Rahul’s excellent version of Chicago’s Metra map (June 2018, 4 stars).
With a great pleasure I have read and learned from your posts and reviews. I would be grateful to hear your opinion on the Copenhagen transit map I developed earlier this year.
The goal is to create a future-proof and iconic network map with design references to the city. The metropolitan area has four rail systems: heavy rail, the overground S-tog, the Metro and light rail. Until now, the different operators have their own style, although fares and transfers are flawless.
The map is inspired by characteristics from the S-trains (routes) and Metro (stations). The iconic 45º routes are simplified and integrated with the new ‘City ring’ to minimise the amount of curves. The lines and stations under construction have a reduced tone. Topography and landmarks are added to improve recognisability. Labels are kept horizontally and as large as possible, but exceptions have been made around the City-ring to suit the graphic concept.
A few custom design experiments are:
Frequency of the C- and E-trains that occasionally terminate earlier
Calling pattern of the rush-hour Bx-line
Focus on transfer stations by marker and large label
S-train markers have a hexagonal shape, referring to the new DSB logo
Also, a negative version with a dark background has been developed to represent the evening and weekend schedule. This map together with the design process can be found on Marco’s project page (well worth checking out – Cam)
Transit Maps says:
There’s something about the future of transit in Copenhagen that seems to be inspiring people to create the most wonderful unofficial maps of it. Hot on the heels of Kristoffer Bæk’s lovely interpretation (January 2019, 4 stars) comes this equally good map from Marco.
Despite my note that Kristoffer had wisely resisted the temptation to make the M3 ring line a perfect circle, Marco has taken that idea and run with it, and he’s been largely successful. It does force some labels around the ring to be set diagonally to fit, but it’s all still nice and clean and legible throughout.
There’s a great underlying grid for this map that holds the whole thing together nicely, with a great sense of rhythm to everything. Everything’s deliberately placed and spaced: I especially like the way that the F line and the future light rail line nest inside each other almost perfectly, always the same distance apart as they encircle the city.
The geographical cues are a good inclusion – it’s good to know that Frederickssund is located on the eastern shore of Roskilde Fjord, for example. It can seem a little busy in parts because of the diagonally striped water background and the lightened “future” labels, but it always provides good context.
The treatment of the rush-hour Bx line seems to have been influenced by the way the New York Subway map treats its rush/express routes – breaking off from the main line to bypass some stations. It’s not normally my preferred approach, but it does reduce the number of lines through the busy city centre by one, so I think it works well enough here.
A minor complaint is that some of the stations (especially Copenhagen Central) have to be stretched out a lot to enable them to reach all the lines that pass through. It’s one slightly less than perfect byproduct of the perfect circle of the M3, but it’s not too distracting, thanks in park to the restrained station symbology that Marco has employed.
The final word: Another sterling look at Copenhagen’s transit future that draws its inspiration from the disparate official maps currently in use and merges them together to great effect. Four stars!
Did you enjoy this post? Do you visit Transit Maps regularly? Consider supporting the site with a small monthly donation via Patreon. Your support makes it possible for me to continue bringing you great content!
Photo taken by Aaron Robinson at Vancouver’s Metrotown station and shared with Transit Maps via Twitter.
It’s not the first Star Wars themed adaptation of an official transit map I’ve seen (there’s also this one from Milan in 2015), but it’s executed nicely. I particularly like the “light saber” glow to the route lines. “VCC-3PO” adds a nice little bit of local flavour as well. The Star Wars-y font used does look a bit like a freebie knockoff from DaFont, but it does the job, I guess. Definitely good to see a transit agency having a bit of fun!
Submitted by a good number of people, who have all spotted this new map in the latest batch of Sydney Trains timetables and want to know what I might think. I’ve talked about a draft version of this map quite a bit on Twitter already, but I may as well compile my thoughts “officially” on the blog as well.
Transit Maps says:
The most obvious change to this revision of the map is the addition of the new Metro North West Line from Tallawong to Chatswood – which also brings about a name change. Whereas previously this had been the “Sydney Trains Network”, it’s now the “Sydney Rail Network”. One could argue that it’s now an incomplete map of that network as the light rail is nowhere to be seen, but that’s a story for another day…
Overall, I find the inclusion of the new Metro line problematic. The “M” at each station seems like overkill to me: the large “M” bullet at each terminus and the cased line treatment do the job of differentiating this new line perfectly well, I think. The dog leg through Epping adds unnecessarily sharp bends to this new “flagship” line, which ideally should be represented by as straight a line as possible to emphasise the notion that it’s fast and modern.
The depiction of the future Metro down the North Shore as running concurrently to the existing line with the new stations located to the south of the line is – to put it bluntly – incorrect and misleading. In reality, the Metro will run in its own tunnel some way to the north of the old line, and I strongly believe that it’s important to show the proper relationship between these lines and stations. The Victoria Cross Metro station will be in walking distance of North Sydney station, but if you used this map, you’d start walking in the wrong direction to move between them! However, I do really like the way that the “under construction” dashed route line integrates with the orange T3 line between Sydenham and Bankstown, neatly conveying that this section of existing track will be upgraded to Metro standards. I do wish they’d straighten out this part more, though.
My other major problem with this map is the repetition of terminus station names. Leppington and Richmond – hardly the most important stations on the map – get named three times each, which is just ridiculous. Part of the problem is the inconsistency of the nomenclature used for the lines. Sometimes they get named after a general direction or region (“Western” or “Illawarra”), and sometimes they get named after the station at the end of the line, like above. I’ve long advocated for the removal of these redundant destination labels on this map, and this version certainly isn’t changing my mind. The stacked treatment of the “T4 Eastern Suburbs” label is another reason to get rid of them: it’s unlike anything else on the map, and really does look like the designer simply ran out of room to make the label fit properly.
The labelling of the Intercity lines also bothers me. “To the Southern Highlands Line”? No, that is the Southern Highlands Line and it goes to Mittagong, Mossvale and Goulburn – the major destinations along the line. Reuse of the three letter codes that the Intercity lines get on their timetables would also be helpful here: “SHL” for this line, for example.
However, I do have to say that I’m overjoyed to see the familiar red of the old Northern Line reappear on this map: it definitely stops the yellow of the T1 line from dominating much of the top half of the map.
The final word: Sydney’s rail system is in a huge state of flux right now, so this map might change yet again when the rest of the Metro opens – hopefully putting everything in the correct relative positions. As it stands, however, this seems to be a slightly messy, thrown together interim map that doesn’t really work as well as it should. The redundant line name labels have to go. 2.5 stars out of 5.
P.S. In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a reworked future version of this map that I made a while back that addresses a lot of the problems I mention above. Note especially the treatment of the Metro through the lower North Shore and Epping, as well as the way that the T5 Cumberland Line crosses over the main Western line at Harris Park, preventing the awkwardness at Parramatta that the official map has.
Did you enjoy this post? Do you visit Transit Maps regularly? Consider supporting the site with a small monthly donation via Patreon. Your support makes it possible for me to continue bringing you great content!
I’d like to submit a map I have been working on for quite some time and finally completed. It’s a diagram of the Shinkansen high speed train network in Japan. As the network is basically one main trunk line going from Kyushu to Hokkaido and several spurs it makes sense to show it in a schematic way. Also high speed makes geography and distance almost irrelevant.
One will easily notice that the 4 main Japanese islands together form roughly a quarter of a circle while the national flag of Japan features a full red disc. Combine both and you get the foundations for a schematic representation of Japan. Add city names, in Japanese and English, and all train services (express, limited express, local) with their own dedicated names et voilà! You get a complete map of all Shinkansen services, no stop no dot, with a very, very iconic feel.
There is also another small diagram below showing the names of the track portions: Hokkaido, Tohoku, Tokaido… I hope you’ll like it!
Transit Maps says:
Another interesting project from the prolific Jug! I really love the stylised, graphical feel to this diagram: the stark red, black and white design is very striking, and the quarter rising sun leaves the reader in very little doubt as to what network is being represented!
The sweeping arc of the main trunk line is masterful: all the stations are spaced precisely one degree around the circle from each other, with their common centre point being the very top left corner of the map. Because of this, the station names seem to radiate evenly out from the edge of the circle: a nice effect. Perhaps strangely, this radial nature doesn’t extend to the lines that head inland, which all use a common 37-degree angle (the angle that Omiya, the first station with a branch line extending from it, is at). The first group of lines doesn’t look so bad, as they all head generally towards the top left corner, but the last branch line to Akita is at a very different angle to the radial type around the circle’s edge, and looks oddly skewed as a result. To be fair, it’s probably like this for a very practical reason as it allows station labels to fit into the spaces between the lines more easily, but I’d love to see a truly radial version of this diagram. I’ve quickly superimposed some blue lines on Jug’s map below to give an idea of what that could look like.
A few more notes: the text on Jug’s project page explains that the popular Japan Rail Pass is not accepted on the fastest Nozomi and Mizuho trains, but this useful information isn’t present on the map itself. Similarly, the station names shown to the north of Shin-Hakodate-Hokuto to Sapporo are part of a future expansion of the network, but no explanation to that effect appears on the map. I’m all for minimalism, but some things do need just a little more explanation.
Finally, a technical note: the white text reversed out of the red background is very fine and would be prone to filling in when printed. It’s often a good idea to bump the font weight up a level when reversing type, or to use a typeface that has positive and negative versions, each tailored for specific applications.
The final word: A strong graphical concept, very well executed. My personal preference would be for the whole diagram to continue on with the radial theme, but I feel sure that Jug explored that option during development before coming up with the solution he felt worked best.
Did you enjoy this post? Do you visit Transit Maps regularly? Consider supporting the site with a small monthly donation via Patreon. Your support makes it possible for me to continue bringing you great content!
I’ve had quite a few requests to review this new map out of Mexico City, so here goes…
The first thing to note is that Lance Wyman, the designer of the original Mexico City Metro logo and much of the design language of that system (the original station icons and the distinctive Tipo Metro typeface, for example) was involved in this work, though I’m not certain as to what extent. Certainly, the Movilidad Integrada “MI” logo to the top left of the map bears all the hallmarks of his work, and it’s this logo that pulls all the branding together.
The surrounding arrows, moving both in and out and to all compass directions, utilize the colours of the eight component parts that make up the integrated system – Concesionado, Cablebús, CETRAM, Metrobús, Ecobici, RTP, Transportes Eléctricos, and the Metro itself. As seen in the tweet by the Secretary of Integrated Mobility embedded below, the logos of these services have been reworked to fit inside the shape made by the new MI logo – a rounded square with triangular notches cut out of each side. I’m also guessing that the line weight of each of the logos has been worked on to make them all consistent.
Al centro el logo del Sistema Integrado del Transporte Público, Movilidad Integrada (MI). Alrededor están logos de organismos de transporte, algunos nuevos, otros iguales, y otros reajustados: Concesionado, Cablebús, CETRAM, Metrobús, Ecobici, RTP, Trasnportes Eléctricos, Metro pic.twitter.com/9iJLp20hcB
In principle, it’s a good way to unify these disparate and varied logos, though I’m more than a little sad that the iconic shape of the Metro logo is now boxed into another less interesting shape. The price to pay for unity?
These notches are repeated as a framing design element across the map: the map itself has notches in its border, as do all the service information boxes below it, except for the two rightmost ones. These are services that are shown on the map (the Tren Suburbano and Mexibús), but that are not part of the MI group, so it’s actually a pretty clever design feature. Their boxes are also light grey instead of white, which helps to further differentiate them.
But what of the map itself?
For starters, it’s diagrammatic instead of geographical like the official Metro map – which I’ve previously likened to “a giant pile of spaghetti” (December 2015, 1.5 stars) – which I think helps enormously to untangle the heavily congested central part of the map. And if this map only showed the Metro and other rail services, I’d probably see it as a huge improvement and call the redesign largely successful.
But! – it also has to incorporate all the other services that make it a truly integrated map, and it deals with some far more successfully than others. Some, like the Tren Ligero and the Tren Suburbano, act as extensions of the Metro network and are integrated easily. The Metrobús services also get treated fairly well, with route numbers and intermediate stops indicated, although the MB4 route is often obscured in the central part of the map by other elements like station names. Finally, the trolleybus and RTP buses are right at the bottom of the information hierarchy and only have general paths shown without any route designations at all. It’s just enough information to let a reader know that these services exist, but is it useful enough to aid in travel planning? I have my doubts.
My biggest problem with the map, however, would have to be the labelling of stations. While Tipo Metro is a wonderfully distinctive typeface and a huge part of the Metro’s identity, I find it particularly unsuitable as a wayfinding typeface. It’s a very wide font, and has a lot of very similar letterforms because of its caps-only form. On this map, it’s also tiny. The official PDF of the map is set up to be slightly less than 36″ wide by 48″ deep (90cm x 120cm), yet the characters for standard labels are just 0.08 inches tall (or about 6 points!). That’s absolutely minuscule, and some labels – such as those for the bus routes – are even smaller. The lack of ascenders and descenders does mean that the labels can be set very compactly – forming neat, uniform blocks – but if the type isn’t legible, is that actually useful?
For the most part, I don’t mind the angled labels – they only go one direction and give a distinctive angularity to the map – but they are a bit inconsistent in places. They’re angled on the northern end of Metro Line B, for example, but horizontal on a corresponding section of the Tren Suburbano.
Some other nice touches: the little cartouches around the bike station icons. The half-thickness of the one-way parts of the bus lines. Excellent use of white keylines to separate different layers of information.
Our rating: A real mixed bag. Any attempt to present an integrated view of transit in a sprawling metropolis like Mexico City should be applauded, but I’m not sure this one totally hits its mark. The overall branding is lovely, but truly integrated transit is more than just branding. Two-and-a-half stars.
Recently I was back in Auckland, after not having been there for years. I discovered that my parents have never caught the bus there; this is despite them living close to reasonable bus routes, and – as senior citizens – having free public transport most of the time. (They are not against public transport; they are just migrants who were never shown how to look up public transport information.) So I tried to get them interested in catching the bus, “You can get to and from home for FREE!”, and I drew them an A4 schematic map of the public transport services in their world.
The map is geared towards just these two people. (I should have done it in my parents’ languages, but… I was basically too lazy to do it in languages other than English.) During my time with them I observed the range of places that they might need to go to, and facilities that they might need, e.g. medical facilities, closer-by shopping centres, public toilets. I have only included lines that they are likely to need, as I didn’t want to clutter the map any further. (For other lines, they can look them up in the official network maps.)
How much each transport hub/station is visually accentuated in the map is based more on its saliency in their lives, and less on its actual size. As for the line colours, I followed the line colours as used by Auckland Transport, so sometimes I could not avoid placing lines with similar colours next to each other. (As for the train lines, I used hues from an older version of the official train network map, to make them somewhat more distinctive from the adjacent bus line colours.) Frequency of the services is indicated by line width and dash style. The apartness of the bus versus train lines at Newmarket and Sylvia Park is iconic of their actual distance. There are also two small circular areas of which the representations are geographically true, and all the bus stops within are shown: these are areas where they need to know the exact location of bus stops.
(They were very happy when I took them on buses, trains, and the ferry, all of them free to them off-peak.)
Transit Maps says:
This is such a heart-warming story, Hilário — thank you for sharing it! Being able to take your design skills and create something so personal and useful to your parents, giving them the confidence to use public transport in their daily lives… it’s just wonderful (I’m not crying, you’re crying!).
What I particularly like is the amount of tailored information that’s there just for your parents: where they get haircuts, where the shops are, where public restrooms can be found, as well as all the hints and tips aimed at helping them find their way confidently. The two detailed insets have just the right amount of information and are integrated into the main map nicely. I also really appreciate that the map isn’t over-designed: this isn’t some fancy piece of high art, but a simple, easy-to-read tool that’s completely appropriate for its (very specific) target market.
I’ve featured a lot of alternative London Underground maps on the site over the years, but this one has to be the most delightfully bonkers one yet and I love it. Each line on the map consists only of stations that share part of their name with each other: so there’s a line for all the stations which have “Park” in their name, for “North”, “South” and other directions and so on. Interchanges occur when a station name contains two different shared elements: “Wood Green” is on both the Wood line and the Green line, for example.
It’s all rather clever, if not exactly useful for any purpose apart from being clever, but I do appreciate the attention to detail. There’s even an “Ampersand” line, as there’s a surprisingly large number of stations that feature one (six, to be precise). The Heathrow Terminal stations get a special double line, as all their names feature both “Heathrow” and “Terminal”. There are five odd-ball lines off to the bottom left that follow the rules but don’t interchange with the main interconnected system, which look a bit strange at first glance. However, they’re probably dealt with as best they can be.
Ali’s rules for inclusion are pretty simple: Underground stations only (no Overground, Tfl Rail, tram or Air Line stations here), and only full words get lines (so there’s no lines for recurring suffixes or prefixes like -gate, -ton, or wood-). There’s one slight exception I can see where “Northwood Hills” (plural) sneaks onto the “Hill” (singular) line, presumably in order to add the one station “Northwood” spur. Of the 267 unique Underground station names, 172 appear on this map, which is impressive!
Head on over Ali’s blog to read more about the project, as well as many, many other Tube map variants.
Did you enjoy this post? Do you visit Transit Maps regularly? Consider supporting the site with a small monthly donation via Patreon. Your support makes it possible for me to continue bringing you great content!
