Submission – Draft Official Map: Sydney Trains, August 2017

August 20, 2017
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Sent my way by quite a few keen-eyed Aussie correspondents, including Thomas Mudgway, who offers this commentary:

Another update from Sydney, this time fairly major. Transport for NSW is making some big changes to Sydney Trains’ operating patterns, with a new order of trains allowing them to boost the Western Line by something like 300 extra services per week. The T2 line cluster has been split so that we now have a T8, which runs to Revesby via the Airport and Macarthur via Sydenham, and a rump T2 which runs to Leppington via Granville but now also has a new spur to Parramatta. The T5 has completed its progression along the Richmond Line, now reaching its end. It seems only a matter of time now until it fully supersedes the T1 there. The T3 is unchanged—for now. However, it will be closed over summer school holidays as far as Bankstown for five years from 2019 to allow it to become part of the new metro line. What will happen to the remainder of the line after that point is currently unclear—perhaps the T2 will be routed that way rather than its current route via Merrylands? Who knows? The T6 will also be closing soon as well, to undergo a conversion to light rail. This raises the possibility of there being two empty slots in Sydney Trains’ numbering scheme.

Stylistically the map is something of a departure from its predecessors, although in its current draft form it should be taken with a grain of salt. The route names are back alongside the line numbers at the various termini, although simplified to show only the name of the specific route branch rather than the name of the whole line cluster as previously. The most immediately obvious change, however, is that the lines themselves have been made much thinner, while the stations have remained about the same size, which gives quite a different aesthetic.

Transit Maps says:

Sydney’s rail network is a bit of a transitional phase at the moment. After decades of remaining pretty much the same both in terms of size and service patterns, things are now changing rapidly. While this is exciting news, it does make maintaining and updating the system map a bit of a thankless chore. That said, I’m not a massive fan of this latest proposed version, which takes quite a few retrograde steps from the previous iteration (January 2016, 3.5 stars).

First off is the thinner route lines, which cause all the station markers to “bubble” out past the edge of each line. I’ve never found this a particularly attractive approach, and my opinion remains unchanged here. The bigger gap between adjacent route lines does allow them to be followed a bit easier, so there is a bit of benefit to be had… if only it didn’t look so bumpy.

The cluster of route lines through the City Circle is starting to become unwieldy with the addition of the new light blue T2 line and the new Sydney Metro line. There’s even a bit of cheating going on with the way that the Green T8 line now overlaps itself on the way in and out of the city. I think a good case could be made to merge all the lines that run the full City Circle (the T2, T4 and T8) into one route line once past Central or even Redfern, which would save considerable space and make the routing of the proposed Metro line fit into the space a lot more coherently.

The addition of the destination names to each outer terminus of the lines is mostly redundant, as in most cases that destination is the same as the final station name. In the cases that they’re different, the destination name is somewhat ambiguous… “Inner West” for Parramatta? Since when was Parramatta part of the inner west? And unfortunately, the two destination labels that are set diagonally at Parramatta and Lidcombe look pretty awful.

The addition of the light blue T2 line helps break down and understand service patterns in the southwest much more easily, but the entire north and northwest of the city is still denoted by one single line, the yellow T1, with multiple endpoints. It’s all a little inconsistent and peculiar for my liking… or maybe I’m still just missing the distinctive red of the old Northern Line through Epping and Hornsby.

I still don’t understand why some non-interchange station names are set bolder than others on the map. Do some trains terminate there? Can you make bus connections there? Are the stations seen as important destination stations? Or all of the above? It all just looks pretty random without any explanation.

Our rating: As Thomas says, this is a draft document and may or may not be final, but I’m not particularly thrilled with what I see at the moment. Two-and-half stars.

Source: Transport for NSW website (link no longer active)

Submission – Unofficial Map: London’s Rail Services by David Milne

August 2, 2017
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Submitted by David, who says:

This all started about 17 years ago as an exercise to teach myself to use Macromedia Freehand. The years passed, Freehand became Adobe Illustrator, and I continued to work on it. The original Idea was to create an A4 sized map to carry around in my pocket, but it quickly became apparent that to contain the desired detail and remain legible it would have to be printed at A1 or A0.

Over time the development of smartphones and tablets was such that I found I no longer carried maps in my pocket, and that the concept of print size was no longer the issue used to be. I now have a version of this map in PDF format, with hotspots on the station names. The hotspots link to the TfL website and open the bus spider map for that station. I keep this on my iPad and iPhone and find it a very useful tool for planning journeys (it is however a big file at 19.2MB).

The brief I developed for myself was for the map to answer the following questions:

Primary questions – Can I get a train from here to there? If yes, do I have to change trains? If yes, where should I change?

Secondary questions – What fare zones will my journey cross, will my ticket be valid? Can access to trains be gained without using steps? Can I change trains without having to walk along the street on a cold wet night (this one comes from bitter personal experience)?

A major decision was to rotate the map by 22.5 degrees, which relates more closely to the real world orientation of the rail lines in London. It also made the placing of station names against station symbols more positive.

A basic design requirement was that the eye should be able to easily follow the lines across the map. To this end, a line should leave a station symbol directly opposite its point of entry, the use of an individual symbol for each line at each station helps in this also.

In addition the use of a symbol per line allows the inclusion of information about access and interchange between platforms.

Designing as a hobby without commercial constraints, the various routes are grouped into lines which make more sense of the service patterns for the traveller. The number of different lines tries to strike a balance between reducing clutter and conveying information about the available services.

Transit Maps says:

Designing a legible, attractive and usable diagram/map for all of greater London’s rail services has been a quest that many designers have set out upon over the years. Some – like this 1965 British Rail map – are quite successful; others perhaps a little less so. However, not many people have spent 17 years (off and on) refining their work like David has. 

The end result is a rather marvellous rotated octolinear diagram – that is, a standard 90/45-degree diagram rotated 22.5 degrees counter-clockwise. David’s been kind enough to share a high resolution version of the diagram with me, and it looks great when you can soak in all the details. It’s not exactly compact – one wonders how David ever though he was going to get this to fit on an A4 sheet! – but a map of this complexity is really never going to be small.

David notes the obvious advantage of rotating the diagram in that horizontal labels nestle into the route lines very neatly. His claim that the rotation suits the geography of London better is a matter of opinion: London’s centre is a bit “blobby” and tends to follow the course of the Thames, so no one set of angles really fits everything. If nothing else, the rotated map just looks very striking, and that can’t be a bad thing.

The other big thing I noticed was David’s rather excellent zone bands. Unlike the official Tube Map, which has very wobbly zone boundaries that have to enclose full station names, David’s are very simple, almost properly concentric. He only encloses station symbols within zones and allows labels to cross over into adjacent zones. However, it’s still very obvious which stations belong to which zone. Top marks for this lovely piece of work, especially with the nastiness of the odd “Zone 2/3″ area to the east of the map.

In correspondence, David and I noticed that we had both independently hit upon very similar solutions for accessibility icons (blue dots and rings within station symbols) and Out-of-Station Interchanges (a thin black connecting line between station symbols instead of the Tube Map’s “dumbbell” connector). Both these solutions are fairly simple and obvious, so I’m not surprised that we did, but it’s always interesting to see this sort of thing.

A few oddities and trade-offs in the design: the Waterloo and City Line takes a surprisingly long and convoluted path between Waterloo and Bank. David’s use of a separate station symbol for every service means that some of the bigger mainline stations have a lot of symbols – Kings Cross St. Pancras has eight, Clapham Junction has seven, etc. I’m not sure about the pecking on the Edgware Road to Wimbledon branch of the District Line: that’s traditionally a technique used for mainline trains, but it does the job of differentiating it from the other District Line service, I guess. The exclusion of the Circle Line (David’s made it a branch of the Hammersmith & City) will be controversial to some.

However! Mornington Crescent is finally in the right place, huzzah!

Our rating: A large-format, information-rich map to savour at great length. A labour of love, tweaked and refined over a long, long period of time, and the results are worth it, I think. Four stars.

Submission – Unofficial Map: Minsk Metro, Belarus by Ilya Birman, Ivan Zviahin and Konstantin Evstratenko

August 2, 2017
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If you ever do a Google image search for the map of the Minsk Metro, you’ll quickly find out that there are a lot of dreary, hackneyed and downright terrible versions of it – both official and unofficial. Despite the simplicity of its X-shaped two-line system (with a third in the works), it just doesn’t seem to inspire good design work.

Until now. 

Ilya Birman – whom Transit Maps has featured a number of times previously – has teamed up with designers Ivan Zviahin and Konstantin Evstratenko to create this absolutely beautiful map, which I totally adore.

The centre of the city is shown geographically, while the outer reaches are shown diagrammatically. This isn’t an unusual technique, but this take on it is particularly stylish, with beautifully rendered grey isometric illustrations of major landmarks (just look at the work put into the stadium!) and a lovely rendition of the city’s waterways and parkland. The soft gradient shadow behind the central circle really helps to lift it out from the background.

More unusually, the map doesn’t have a legend – non-obvious elements are labelled in place as needed, which helps to keep the design nice and clean. Dots in the central part indicate the location of station entrances from the street; a very nice touch. The halftone dot effect used to indicate the future Green Line is attractive, subtle and not something I’ve seen before, but it works really well. 

Ilya’s reused his directional station finder index from his 2013 Moscow Metro map: on a simple system like this, it’s very effective – just follow the arrows to find your station!

Our rating: On his website, Ilya states that the goal of this project was to “design [a] Minsk Metro map for other cities to be jealous of”, and I think he’s definitely succeeded. Head on over to check out the design process and some lovely detailed images of the map’s elements. 5 well-earned stars.

Source: Ilya Birman

New Yorker Cover, March 5th, 2012 – “Second Ave Line” by Roz Chast

August 1, 2017
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A classic New Yorker cover, showing the much-maligned Second Avenue Subway (still five years from completion of even Phase 1 at the time of publication) wending its way past a series of increasingly unlikely stations. Papua New Guinea, Saturn and the Yukon Territories are my favourites. 

Historical Map: A Progress Report on the Interstate Highway System, 1961

July 27, 2017
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A great old map on a subject matter very dear to my heart – the Interstate Highway System. Produced in 1961 by the Caterpillar Tractor Company, who stood to gain a great deal in the construction work required to complete the network, it shows the proposed completed network in white, sections under construction with blue dashes, and – somewhat counter-intuitively – sections that are open to traffic in red.

It’s immediately apparent how little of the system has been built to this point, some five years after the original Federal Aid Highway Act was signed into law. A beautifully formatted table to the right – look at those wonderful hanging tenths of a mile! – breaks down exactly how much work remains to be done on a state-by-state basis. Note also the original numbering of many of the highways: what is currently I-84 from Portland, Oregon to Echo, Utah is labelled as I-80N, for example. The rather breathless copy at the top of the map is worth a read as well, as it exhorts the nation to get this thing done! 

“After all, if we don’t do it… who will?”

Our rating: An awesome map about the history of Interstate Highways? What’s not to love? Four stars.

See also my subway map of the Interstate Highway system.

Source: Cornell University Library

Historical Map: Nuclear Weapons Complex Transportation Routes, 1988

July 27, 2017
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Here’s an unusual use of transit map design principles – a map produced by the Radioactive Waste Campaign in 1988 of the routes used to transport nuclear materials and waste around the United States. This diagrammatic approach actually works very well here – as the legend to the map says:

The origin and destination of these routes are well known. However, because of government secrecy, the exact path of these routes is conjectured.

Without the need to show actual routings along real highways, the map is free to simplify things as needed. I’m not quite sure why the routes still take wobbly paths across the country when straight lines would look so much cleaner. The routes could also use a few more directional arrows to make it explicit which direction materials are travelling in. Some of the longer lines are hard work to follow from one end to the other! The little loop from Sandia to Los Alamos in New Mexico is pretty niftily done, and the color scheme is suitably dramatic – the strident magenta background really helps the map pop.

Our rating: Transit map as anti-nuclear infographic! Three stars.

Source: David Rumsey Map Collection

Fantasy Map: Major Rivers of the United States by Theodore Rindos

July 24, 2017
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The early history of the United States is filled with explorers and pioneers making use of rivers as “rapid transit” to quickly travel through otherwise inhospitable or unknown lands. So it makes sense that someone would attempt to show this network in the simplified form of a subway map, and here is one such example by Theo Rindos.

Of course, such a map instantly puts me in mind of Daniel Huffman’s superb series of river/subway maps, but Daniel’s series concentrates more on individual watersheds than the USA as a whole and is a very different beast.

Overall, the map is quite attractive and the comprehensive legend is useful and informative. However, the inclusion of some of the rivers on the map seems somewhat arbitrary to me – most of the “main line” rivers seem to be chosen in order of descending main branch length, but then the Yellowstone River is included instead of a large number of longer rivers. The secondary list of “bus routes” similarly skips quite a few rivers, possibly with the intent of including maps like the Hudson and Sacramento in regions that lack longer rivers. 

This does have the result of producing a nicer-looking network which spans the entire country, but at the cost of making sense of the underlying data (which is missing certain longer rivers simply because they couldn’t fit). The inclusion of all three parts of the Platte River is particularly noticeable in this regard as they obviously are there to create a “connecting bus service” between the Colorado and Missouri Rivers.

Also a little odd is Theo’s two-letter abbreviation for each line, which insists on using “R” for “river” as the second letter. This gives us the non-useful designation of “UR” for the Columbia River, as the Colorado has already taken the more obvious “CR”. A better approach would be to use the two-letter state abbreviations for those rivers that share a state’s name, and then more meaningful codes for the remaining rivers. Thus, the Colorado would be “CO”, and the Columbia could then perhaps be “CU” or “CR”.

Finally, Mountain Home, Idaho is some 12 miles distant from the Snake River – the nearest town of any size that actually sits on the river would actually be Glenns Ferry. I can’t comment on the accuracy of other city names further east.

Our rating: Cherrypicks the underlying data a bit to create a comprehensive network, but looks pretty nifty. Three stars.

Source: Reddit

Submission – Illustrated map of Qingdao Metro’s Line 3, China

July 19, 2017
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Submitted by Bailey, who says:

Here’s a map from of the Qingdao Metro for Line 3 – quite an interesting, stylistic one. For all the effort that went into the (quite brilliant) artwork, I’m surprised the station names are entirely unreadable near the city center.

Transit Maps says:

Despite the name, Line 3 is actually the first Metro line constructed in Qingdao, opening in two stages from 2015. In typical Chinese style, it’ll be joined by many more in just a few short years – by 2050, there will be 16 lines with a network length of some 836 kilometres (519 miles)!

Bailey’s right when he says that the illustration style is quite lovely, although one could argue that it’s presenting a very rose-tinted view of the city, with fields and trees shown everywhere as if in some bucolic pastoral idyll. What looks like a sunny beach in the bite-shaped area to the left is actually the city’s port –the seventh busiest in the world by volume handled. 

However, notable landmarks are incorporated nicely, including some of the old German colonial buildings from the late 19th century. Despite the busy feeling to the illustration style, the red route line stands out well, and the type isn’t quite as invisible as Bailey thinks.

Our rating: A rather pleasant little illustrated map, if just a little idealised. Three stars.

Source: Quingdao Metro website (link no longer active)

Historical Map: Manchester Ship Canal, England, c. 1928?

July 18, 2017
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Not a “traditional” transit map, but it does show an important transportation network in a simplified strip map form, so that’s good enough for me! 

This absolutely gorgeous two-colour map straightens out all the kinks in the eponymous canal, presenting it as a dead straight line from one end to the other. The variable scale is indicated by the mile markers on either side of the map: the less interesting parts of the canal get condensed into very small spaces, while the important bits get more room (just like modern transit maps). 

Of particular note are the lovingly rendered bridges that cross the canal, each drawn individually and precisely. Their identifiable silhouettes act as landmarks along the canal, so this is a very nice touch.

The source of this map dates it at 1923, but it uses Gill Sans as its primary typeface. Gill Sans wasn’t released until 1928, so that date seems unlikely.

Our rating: Simply gorgeous. 5 stars!

Source: Cyber Badger

Historical Map: 1967 San Francisco Muni Rapid Transit Plan

June 23, 2017
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I’m ever so slightly in love with this simple little map showing proposed rapid transit lines in San Francisco. There’s some lovely texture for the parkland, a nice vignetted effect for the coastline, and some great mid-century typography as well – all rather delightful! 

There’s a great information hierarchy as well, with buses being thin light blue lines, then trolley buses slightly thicker brown lines. Cable cars are shown by thin black lines that still appear visually stronger than trolley buses, and the proposed lines are unmissable thick black lines with stations clearly shown. There’s even a lovely little compass rose!

Our rating: A great example of a map doing sterling work with a judicious use of just a few colours, combined with a good information hierarchy. Four stars!

Source: Eric Fischer/Twitter