Submitted by Jessie Archer (who I note has an “appalcart.com” email address, so possibly had something to do with the creation of this map).
Transit Maps says:
First off, can we just note how awesome “AppalCART” is as a transit system name for a city in this part of North Carolina? Possibly one of my favourites ever.
At first look, this is a reasonably attractive bus system map, especially for a smaller transit agency but it does feel a little rough and unfinished overall.
The stylised framework of the map is fine, but I’m not entirely sure that every little street and road in Boone needs to be shown in such detail – it feels a little busy and unnecessary. My general feeling is that a map like this should only show major arterial roads and those that the buses actually travel on. If the road doesn’t merit a label, then its inclusion is debatable.
There’s a few contrast issues with the route lines and the background, especially the light blue “Express” route, which almost completely disappears. While the palette of colours is quite pleasing, the route lines really could stand to be just a bit brighter in order to make them “pop” from the background.
The spacing in between concurrent route lines is perhaps too wide, being almost as wide as the route lines themselves. This prevents adjacent lines being read as a coherent whole travelling along a single road, especially in the busier central portion of the map.
I’m also not convinced that the map’s solution for directional stops – one that requires a detailed explanation in the map’s legend – actually works that well. Most maps solve this by using arrows at each stop to indicate the direction of travel (with a dot or double-headed arrow for bi-directional travel), which is more instantly obvious to the reader. Working out which side of the road is the “left” or “right” is way too mentally taxing, especially when the routes travel in every direction.
I’d also like to see labels on the parks, actual depictions of the college’s football and baseball stadiums, and perhaps a shaded area denoting the main ASU campus as well.
Our rating: Definitely has the potential to be really good – it certainly has a lot of the right elements – but this feels like a second or third draft that needs some more refinement and polish to really sing. Two stars.
The proposal for a Light Rail system for Cork City, Ireland. The proposal is from People Before Profit, Ireland’s socialist party. Light rail has long been promised for the city, but recent government initiatives have made it a more likely possibility.
It connects in the north to Cork’s suburban rail system, the regional (underdeveloped) heavy rail system, which connects to other parts of the country (as well as to Northern Ireland).
Transit Maps says:
Of all the types of “bad” transit maps, the poorly rendered “vision for the future” has to be one of the most frustrating. A map like this serves as a massive opportunity to generate excitement for a sustainable, transit-oriented, less car-reliant future in Cork… and this is what was presented? Unfortunately, it just looks shockingly amateur in its execution – which, in turn, reflects poorly on the proposal itself, regardless of the concepts contained within (which also seem to advocate for expansion of the commuter rail network, with stations added or reopened after extended closure).
All-caps labels set at wildly varying angles, poor typography, an ugly call-out box, no legend, clashing colours… need I go on?
Our rating: Half a star, because it’s not quite as horrific as some maps that I’ve given zero to, but it’s still a very (un)worthy Hall of Shame entrant.
Earlier this year, I was commissioned to create a series of trade route maps for Wallenius Wilhelmsen Ocean, a leading global provider of deep-sea ocean transportation for cars, trucks, rolling equipment and breakbulk cargo. The client had already developed some rough “subway map” visualizations for their network, noting that their current geographical maps of longer routes compressed many ports into very small areas while leaving vast swathes of empty ocean taking up the majority of space. Their theory was that a subway map visualization could expand the denser areas (especially Europe and Japan/Korea), while vastly reducing the amount of wasted empty space – a problem not too dissimilar to that faced by H.C. Beck when he first drew up his famous Tube Map in 1931.
This is one of my latest works: an integrated rail diagram for the Baltimore and Washington DC areas. The style is inspired by Vignelli’s subway maps from the 70s. There are no intentional geographic references. I have tried to show all rail services – heavy, light rail and streetcar – in the same manner (all strokes are of the same thickness). Station indicators are different depending on service/transportation mode (circle = metro, subway, square = light rail, streetcar, diamond = regional, commuter rail). The diagram is supposed to reflect current services and lines under construction and two proposed infill stations (metro: Potomac Yard; commuter: Potomac Shores). What are your thoughts on this?
Transit Maps says:
A really nice bit of work from Chris here, which overall does a good job of dealing with the differing scales of the component systems. Because of its more tightly spaced light rail lines, Baltimore comes off looking a little bit cramped in comparison to DC, but it’s not a huge deal. On the other hand, this is probably the best representation of the Purple Line I’ve seen so far, with a simple trajectory and lovely, evenly-spaced stations.
It’s perhaps a little unfortunate that the shortest line – the current DC Streetcar, here renamed as Line 4 – is visually the strongest, as it draws the viewer’s eye right to it. All the other streetcar/light rail lines are pastel hues, so the dark charcoal grey used here seems out of place.
The different station marker shapes are a good idea in principle, though they can be a little hard to tell apart at a glance. Particular care needs to be taken with the square and the diamond and their relationship to the line that they sit on to prevent confusion – when lines are angled at 45 degrees like on the left of the map, it becomes even more difficult to quickly tell if a station is a square or a diamond.
I personally prefer to flip the Silver Line (Chris’ Line F) underneath the Orange Line (Line E) at East Falls Church so that it travels across the map sandwiched between the Orange and Blue lines. This gets rid of the need for the dinky little jog that the Silver Line has to do after Stadium-Armory, which always seems a little detailed and fussy in a diagram like this.
Our rating: Very competent and stylish, and definitely makes one dream of a day when rail transit in this region is unified under a single fare structure, much like a German Verkehrsverbund. Three-and-a-half stars.
Ever since I first designed it way back in 2012, I’ve tried to keep my popular alternative Boston MBTA rapid transit map updated as new stations opened and other changes to the network happened. However, with the opening of the Silver Line route to Chelsea (SL3) earlier this year, certain parts of my design just weren’t going to cut it anymore. Looking at the old version, it was also painfully obvious to me that I could do a much better job now with all that I’ve learned over the intervening six years. So! Redesign!
View the map below (updated to March 2022 with the opening of the GLX to Union Square), or click here to view it full-screen.
First things first: note that this an evolution of the previous version, not a complete redesign. So a lot of the general look and feel remains the same – the 3:2 ratio of the overall dimensions, the use of a circle centred on Bowdoin to define the scale and grid of the map, the distinctive configuration of the Green Line branches, etc. These are all things that I was still happy with from the previous version, so they became part of the building blocks for this version.
One thing I really wanted this new map to be was a little less generic than my old one: its station connectors and iconography really looked like they could have belonged to pretty much any city. So I looked back to the original 1967 MBTA spider maps, which used black dots for stations with thin connector lines between lines at North Station and Haymarket; while the individual line map used coloured squares to indicate connections to other lines (see image to left). I used these as inspiration for the station markers on my map, drawing on the MBTA’s heritage while also updating them slightly to account for the modern system’s increased complexity. Using black dots meant that I had to brighten up the line colours considerably from the old version, which used richer “heritage” hues, like crimson for the Red Line in honour of Harvard instead of a normal red. The 1967 spider map also inspired my use of a thinner route line for the Mattapan Line, which really helps differentiate it from the adjacent Red Line at Ashmont. While it may seem heretical to some, I also ditched Helvetica Medium as the map’s typeface, opting for the superbly legible Fira Sans instead (also used on my Amtrak Subway Map). Finally, I’ve employed the superb Accessible Icon to indicate accessibility at rail stations – it reads much better at smaller sizes than the old ISO Standards icon; and it originated in Boston, so its use seems highly appropriate.
From here, a lot of the work was just being far more deliberate with how the map was structured. More elements were purposefully aligned with each other this time around, which creates a cleaner, more organised feel. For example, the Red Line from Alewife all the way down to Braintree is now a perfectly symmetrical bow shape, which pleases me immensely. The Needham Line (included in full this time around!) lines up with Forest Hills station, then Morton St, then Shawmut. The Mattapan Line aligns with the Greenbush Line. The Red Line bullet at Braintree aligns with the Blue Line bullet at Wonderland, defining the eastern edge of the network. There’s way too many examples to write about, so here’s a picture. The pink guide lines show intentional relationships between elements on the map: note in particular how the baselines of station labels line up all across the map to create invisible horizontal gridlines.
The Silver Line was simplified a lot from the old map: running three lines in parallel for the SL1, SL2 and SL3 out of South Station was going to be too unwieldy, so one line was to represent all trunk services. I also committed to horizontal labels for the Silver Line, so the SL2 down to Design Center doesn’t quite maintain its true geographical relationship to the Red Line now, extending far further south than it should. However, I think this is a worthwhile tradeoff, as the Silver Line is now a lot more legible and attractive. The new SL3 up to Chelsea integrates itself into the network very cleanly, I think. In a little bit of a cheat, I haven’t used accessibility icons for the Silver Line in order to make the map a bit less cluttered, although its full accessibility status is noted in the legend at the top.
Other things I’m really pleased with: the simplified geography of the coastline and the fading gradient blue to represent water. The even spacing of all the stations on the Orange Line (the northern half was compressed a lot on the old version simply because I was running out of room). The use of bullets to indicate the downtown Green Line branch turnaround stations (also explained fully in the legend). The perfect “Y” bifurcation of the commuter rail lines at Back Bay. The detailed and accurate depiction of the station layout and services at Readville. The indication that only the Silver Line is accessible at Boylston. Very few labels cutting across route lines (There’s only three, compared to at least 11 on the previous version).
For me, this new version is a huge improvement over the old one – not just in how it looks, but also in the way that I pulled the whole thing together. The design gelled right from the start, and I made almost no compromises to the design rules that I set up at the start of the project – always a big indicator of success! While my memory is hazy of the process from six years ago, this version felt like it took far less time and wasn’t anywhere near as frustrating.
Gotham City Subway Map on the set of the new Joker movie filming at Bedford Park Blvd station. What are your thoughts on this?
Transit Maps says:
There’s plenty of other posts out there on the internet that talk about the innumerable easter eggs in this map – Kane County, Starlin Avenue, etc. – so I’m just going to talk about the map itself here.
Previously, The Dark Knight Rises riffed off the current New York Subway map, so it’s fun to see this movie use a Vignelli-inspired map instead, even if it’s not a perfect stylistic homage. I mean, randomly angled labels on a Vignelli diagram? It just wouldn’t happen. The network itself also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense: what happens to the “H” from Burnside when it joins onto the “K” near Fort Hamilton? Where does the “8″ end and the “9″ begin? Most of the routes seem to be unnecessarily circuitous – this network really needs a couple of good, straight trunk lines instead of all this weaving around.
The “How to Use This Map” text at the top left of the map has been cribbed directly off the Vignelli diagram, although with poor spelling and punctuation. The Gotham Heights neighbourhood label covers up a couple of station names, which is pretty unforgivable. The GTA logo is pretty neat, if a bit large on the map.
Very notable is that the general geography of Gotham City – the shape and position of the islands – remains faithful to what’s been established in the comics and The Dark Knight Rises, even if locality names and the entire transit network itself are completely different.
A pair of wonderful diagrammatic pocket maps showing the F-Zug or “Long-Distance Train” intercity services (in blue) and the Trans-Europe Express (TEE) services (in red) of West Germany in the summer of 1969. The first diagram shows southbound routes, while the second shows northbound. Each diagram also serves as a schedule, with arrival and departure times denoted clearly along each route line. A few non-standard angles don’t detract from the excellent draftsmanship on display here: I particularly like the sweeping 90-degree curve between Cologne and Duisburg, with no fewer than 13 routes shown.
Of particular note is the prominence of the area around Cologne and the Ruhr – enlarged many times over for clarity – which dominates the map in terms of both stations and routes.
The evocative route names in the list to the right are also rather wonderful – Rheingold, Rembrandt, Porta Westfalica among them – and so much more interesting than the bland numerical designation so many European trains receive today.
Our rating: Making a complex network look simple. the current DB Intercity map (PDF link) could look to this as inspiration on how to do it right. Five glorious stars.
A few months ago I made a trolleybus routes map for my hometown Kemerovo. Map is considered to become an official map of Kemerovo trolleybus system soon.
This is a very competent map that Kirill has designed, although I do feel that I’ve seen some of the elements used to create it before in this 2015 map of the tram network of Chelyabinsk by Ilya Birman and Alexander Karavaev. The flared station ticks, enlarged route designation numbers arranged across the route lines, shadows where lines pass under another one and even the reduction of the city’s coat of arms to a black and white version are all very reminiscent of that work for me.
Leaving that aside, I do wonder why the map doesn’t incorporate Kemerovo’s five-line tram network alongside the trolleybuses. It always seems odd to me when complementary transit services are presented on separate maps with no indication that any other mode exists, or “mode vacuum” as I like to call it.
Other thoughts: I like the stylistic treatment of the water on the Tom River, though it looks a little unfinished on the other tributary rivers. The icons for major city buildings are nicely executed, though I do prefer it when all the buildings are drawn from the same perspective, as this gives greater unity to the map. Here, three are drawn from street level but the fourth is drawn from an aerial perspective. Though the map is largely self-explanatory, a legend would still be nice. A bilingual Russian/English version might be nice to see – always a fun design challenge to make that work.
From an anonymous reader: Someone recently showed me an article in the magazine Railway Age that reviewed the software application LineMap Draw. Have you heard of it? Any thoughts about it? It says it would save time creating maps. It’s only available for PCs, so as a Mac-user, I’m not able try out the free demo. I am also skeptical about using it over a tried-and-true vector program like Illustrator. More info can be found here.
Transit Maps says:
I hadn’t heard of this software at all before this message, so I headed over to the website to check it out. Realistically, I can’t see this as a replacement for Adobe Illustrator for any professional map makers, or for amateurs who want to learn how to make industry-standard maps. It’s just too simplistic and limited in its functions to be able to create complex, aesthetically pleasing maps, as the screenshot above demonstrates. That’s a pretty rough transit map by anyone’s definition.
It might have been useful as a tool for hobbyists who wanted to develop a quick map – maybe of a fantasy network – without the learning curve and expense of Illustrator, but the “Home” version is absolutely crippled with a maximum canvas size of 1200px by 1200px, which is just 4 inches square at 300dpi output. If you wanted to print something at a halfway decent size of A3, for example, you’d have to shell out for the “Large” version, which is €149 ($US170), not an insignificant sum. To me, the whole licensing system of the software makes little sense – five different versions, each with an upper limit on the size of the output (Home, Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large). It all sounds rather frustrating and confusing – not to mention the fact that the software outputs as JPG only, which is pretty much a deal-breaker on its own.
So, no, I can’t recommend this software at all. If you’re serious about making transit maps, then vector-based illustration software is the only way to go. Illustrator is the industry standard, but great maps can be made with Inkscape, Affinity Designer and more.
