Here’s a superb visualization of the fastest travel times by rail to major European cities from Frankfurt am Main (here rendered in its obsolete English form of “Frankfort”) in 1928.
The striking time bands – a form of isochrone – are rendered in bold alternating concentric “target” circles around the city itself, represented by a modernist “F” logo. For the most part, the cities seem to placed along correct headings relative to Frankfurt, although the time scale means that actual distances aren’t necessarily conveyed accurately. Poor old Lisbon takes some 72 hours to get to, far more than even distant Moscow or Odessa!
The map is from a publication produced by the City of Frankfurt entitled Frankfurt-on-Main: Economic Facts and Statistics, almost certainly produced to entice foreign (English?) economic investment in the city.
Our rating: A wonderful little graphic, highlighting Frankfurt’s central location in Europe in a bold, compelling way. Five stars!
Source: @chaosforscherin/Twitter (account no longer active), with a H/T to Taras Grescoe
Jose sent me a link to this still-evolving project via Twitter the other day, and his post on Medium about it is well worth reading, even through the filter of Google Translate. He’s got a lot of great ideas, and it’s always fun seeing how other people approach codifying their design principles for a map.
What really caught my eye was this GIF showing the evolution of Jose’s map, all the way from the initial red horizontal Line 1, through to a (nearly) finished map. The little tweaks and edits along the way are quite fascinating to see – almost as if we’re watching Jose “solve” a puzzle.
I recently travelled through Basel, in North West Switzerland and noticed this map. It shows the suburban train network of the city, that reaches into Germany and France. I think the map itself is quite well made (very simplistic), but my subjective observation is that the system isn’t as unified as it seems – neither DB nor SNCF advertise their respective as “S-Bahn Basel” or “RER Bâle”. You can also notice that it is a Swiss-made map through the station names: Lörrach Dammstrasse, for example, is actually spelled -straße but Switzerland doesn’t use that letter.
Transit Maps says:
I think there’s a reason why the system isn’t as unified as it first appears, Simon. The Trireno initiative is a long-term plan that aims to have S-Bahn style rail service (30 minute headways on the branches, interlined to 15 minutes or less in the core) in and around the Basel conurbation by 2030. This map only reflects the current, early stages of the program – with the S-Bahn confined to Switzerland and connecting services in France and Germany handled by existing regional trains. The proposed 2030 system can be seen in the map below – looking much more complete and impressive.
Design-wise, the two maps are pretty similar (good!). The route lines are a little too spindly and thin for me, and the station labelling is inconsistent – why are they angled on the purple S9 line, when they’re horizontal on the adjacent blue S3? I do like the subtle national border markers – they’re there if you look, but as the idea of the system is to build up stronger transit that transcends boundaries, they’re very small and restrained.
Our rating: Not extraordinary, but solid enough. Nice to see that the design language scales up to the 2030 map pretty well. Three stars.
It’s me again, Moritz – this time with an unofficial redesign of the light rail and regional rail map of my hometown, Dortmund. The light rail network itself is based on a simple principle where the trunk routes form a triangle in the city centre, thus allowing to reach every station with no more than one change of trains at one of the three central intersecting points. To depict this structure in the simplest way possible, I’ve chosen a 60-degree grid, which also allows the reduction of bends in the lines to a minimum. This network is then supplemented by the suburban and regional rail lines. They have the same thickness as the light rail lines to emphasise their importance also for journeys within the city, as in my opinion especially the suburban rail lines (S-Bahn) have to be presented to the user visually much more equal to the light rail as they are in the official map.
I have, however, left out most of the stations that are not within the city (= fare zone) boundaries of Dortmund as you’d have to consult the regional rail map anyway if you wanted to plan a journey out of the city; this way the fare zone border has to be marked only where there is an exception. Finally, I got rid of the “U” station markers as they are a historical relict connected to the development of public transport in the region. (They were used to differentiate between “Stadtbahn” and “Stadtbahnvorlaufbetrieb” routes on the one hand and tram routes on the other hand, but this technical difference is completely irrelevant to the user as they have the same speed and frequency. This can be seen in the official map legend, where the difference – although made! – is not even explained.)
I’m curious about your opinion!
Transit Maps says:
Oh, I do like this, Moritz! Very clean and simple, and the teardrop shape that the U45/U46 makes is rather lovely. The 30/60 degree angles work well, and for the most part the schematic representation maps fairly well to reality – the exception being the northern leg of the U47, which takes quite a different trajectory. That said, I can see why you’ve done it the way you have.
Possibly the only part that is slightly confusing is the two light grey Regionalexpress lines running east out of the Hauptbahnhof, as it’s a little difficult to tell how they relate to the lines coming in from the other directions. It might be that the two separate lines aren’t required: RE services run along this line with some stopping at Schamhorst and Kurl, and others not. It’s not always the map’s job to depict every single service pattern.
The “H-Bahn” had me intrigued, so I had to look it up. It’s one of those rarest of rail transit systems – a suspended railway!
Our rating: Clean, modern, stylish: there’s a lot to like about this! 3.5 stars.
Those TriMet designers are at it again! Just a week or so after their superb TriMet/WMATA mash-up comes this new map that reimagines Portland’s MAX light rail as the Bay Area’s BART.
On first glance, it’s another near-perfect rendition of the source map and there’s a lot of neat touches. The reworking of TriMet’s logo to match BART’s famous lower-case “ba” logo is wonderful, and the accurate depiction of the Red Line’s corkscrew to get from Gateway up towards the airport is masterfully done. Reducing WES to the “Beige Line” seems somehow appropriate, and the call out box to show its limited hours is perfect.
A couple of minor quibbles: the real BART map contains no vertical route lines at all, so they look a little “wrong” here. However, rejigging all of them to the slight rightwards angle that BART uses would be problematic, so I can see why that’s been left out. Also, it looks like the typeface used is Akzidenz Grotesk, when BART uses Frutiger. Some more blue locality labels for Gresham, Beaverton, etc. would have been nice. Finally, a couple of typos that immediately stood out: “TRIMET sytem map” at top left, and “Albina/Missisissipi“.
A fun reaction to this one on Twitter:
So how does one get the job at TriMet that involves drawing the system map in the style of other transit systems? Asking for a friend… https://t.co/VP3XLvrozW
— Militant 'Alleged Shill for Big Muni' Pedestrian (@transbay) January 24, 2019
Here’s a handsome map from a prospectus produced in the early 20th century to promote the exclusive new Laurelhurst addition in Portland, Oregon. Prominently shown in yellow “gold” ink are the three streetcar lines that provided service to the neighbourhood — the Rose City Park line, the Montavilla line, and the Sunnyside line.
Streetcar lines to other parts of the city are also clearly shown, just not given the exclusive treatment of the other three. Downtown, the Portland Hotel is shown, which is now the location of Pioneer Courthouse Square. Also of interest are the names of other additions and neighbourhoods — some are still in use, like Ladd’s Addition, Irvington and Montavilla. Others not so much… the Tabasco Addition didn’t seem to catch on so well.
I’ve made a map of my hometown Copenhagen’s transit system as it will look from summer 2019, when the circle metro line opens after a ~10 year long construction phase. A regional rail line to Ringsted will open at the same time.
There are two local train systems in Copenhagen, S trains and Metro, but the official maps for the two systems use quite different map styles. Once the circle line opens, however, I feel that the two services should absolutely be combined in one map. I don’t know if there’s going to be an official combined map though, I haven’t seen any signs of it. I have used the current colors for the S train lines, but changed the metro line colors, as the official colors (green, yellow, blue, and orange) are too similar to the S train line colors, in my opinion. Also, I wanted the two systems to have a slightly different color scheme.
Transit Maps says:
I caught a glimpse of Kristoffer’s map on Twitter a little while back and liked what I saw, so I’m really pleased that he’s submitted the finished piece to the site. It’s a lovely map too, skillfully and confidently executed in a very clean and modern style. I particularly like the minimalist but effective legend at the bottom, and the colours throughout are gorgeous. The gradient in the water is particularly well-handled, as this type of effect often has the potential to look awful.
Kristoffer has resisted the temptation to make the “circle line” a literal circle, and I think it’s a wise choice – a circle wouldn’t fit in with the angularity of the rest of the map. The generous corner radii used help to soften the shape of the line, which works well.
Some minor things: I’m not too fond of having line bullets angled with their line, as it makes them a little harder to read and changes their shape relative to straight ones (a square becomes a diamond, for example). There’s probably a case for having the “C” line move over to run adjacent to the other lines between Svanemøllen and Hellerup stations, just to avoid the big gap between the lines at Hellerup. The little jog of the main line railway between Central and Nørreport could be a little smoother to be in keeping with the generous curves I mentioned before.
Our rating: Clean, modern and rather wonderful. If there is to be a unified rail map in Copenhagen’s future, can it look like this, please? Four stars.
A mid-1970s map of the LIRR, designed specifically to be given to “news media representatives who cover the Long Island Railroad (sic) and the MTA on a regular basis”, presumably to give them accurate facts at their fingertips when they wrote about the railroad. 234 miles of line! 700 scheduled trains a day!
It’s a curious thing, drawn precisely in parts (see the lines out of Jamaica) and very roughly in others; the illustration of the train below the map is almost child-like in its execution. Lots of hand-lettering.
The IRT’s connections between the LIRR at Long Island City/Hunterspoint Avenue and NY Penn Station seem rather overstated: the rainbow lines and pinwheel seem to suggest that all nine IRT lines (I correlated the colours and lines to the contemporaneous subway map) have a direct connection, when only the 7 provides one.
The very 1970s fat line “rising sun” LIRR logo to the top right of the map isn’t one I’ve seen before… some quick research suggests it was short-lived and not used publicly very much.
Hello! Rio de Janeiro has, now and finally, a new official map of all the metropolitan transport system. Here, we have BRT corridors, tramways, metro lines and a suburban rail, but each system used to have your own map in the stations. What you think about the design of it?
Transit Maps says:
The text on the government web page promoting this map roughly translates to: “This tool… aims to standardize the visualization of all transport services of high and medium capacities and the respective integrations available to users”, which is a very laudable goal. However, I’m not sure it’s totally successful, for a few reasons.
The lack of differentiation between modes is the biggest thing: almost every route, no matter the mode or frequency of service is the same exact thickness. As a result, there’s no hierarchy to the map at all. Personally, I would have made the Metro lines thicker and more prominent than everything else because of the higher frequency of service: it forms the literal backbone of the transit network. At the moment, actually finding the Metro on the map is a lot of hard work!
There’s also quite a few similar colours used for different lines throughout the map. The worst example of this is two Line 2s (Metro and light rail) that are both green. Speaking of which, the two systems should really use different nomenclature to allow them to be told apart more easily… Lines 1, 2 and 4 for the Metro, but Lines A, B and C for the light rail, for example.
Station labelling is somewhat inconsistent: some angled route lines use horizontal labels (mainly to the top of the map), while others have diagonal labels. Lots of intercity bus terminals to the right side of the map have their labels set at angles for no discernible reason. The coastline is generally simplified nicely, but the borders of the parklands are too detailed by comparison. There’s even one park to the west of Nilópolis that hasn’t been properly simplified to 45-degree angles! Including a note that the map is not to scale directly underneath a scale bar seems a little odd.
On the plus side, the layout is generally pleasing and the legend is quite comprehensive and well laid out.
Our rating: Promises a lot, but doesn’t quite deliver. Looks clean and modern, but not very intuitive or easy to use. Two-and-a-half stars.
TriMet just posted a new system map — that they themselves made — that’s a note-perfect homage to the Washington, DC Metro system map.
Just look at this work of art! It’s got thick route lines, tightly-set Helvetica, lush green parks, freeways and rivers. About the only thing missing are icons for the big tourist spots, like Powells Books or the Japanese Garden or Big Pink. Of course, TriMet has had to let everyone know that this is just for giggles and that the system map is not actually changing to this style. They’re also taking requests for their next mash-up… anyone got some fun ideas?
