Submission – Fantasy Map: Vitória, Brazil (yes, another one!) by Vinicius

April 14, 2017
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Hey Cameron. It was so interesting to stumble upon a fantasy map of Vitória, Brazil on Transit Maps. The story was very touching to me — just like Frederico, I also moved away from Vitória, and also made a fantasy map of its transit network as a way to connect back to a city I still care so much.

My project was supposed to be more artistic than accurate in any way. I finished it last January, and my ultimate goal was just to have a map that my close friends could hang in their walls :).

As a San Francisco resident, BART was my main inspiration for the way the map is composed. Vitória is an island, so its geographic aspects felt as important as it does to the Bay Area.

It’s very interesting to compare my end result to Frederico’s approach. While I didn’t use any of the proposed BRT lines as a reference, there’s a lot of similarities. Also, we both revived the extinguished waterways that Vitória had with its neighbor cities by keeping the old stations.

One particular aspect that I think is worth mentioning, is how I’ve included in the diagram a line that covers the island surroundings. Thinking about the social and political aspects of such line, it would probably be the hardest part to put out of this fantasy map, as it directly connects very poor neighborhoods like Andorinhas to rich parts of the city like Praia do Canto.

Transit Maps says:

Until Frederico submitted his fantasy map last week, I had barely even heard of Vitória, so to have two fantasy maps of it submitted in such short time is kind of awesome… and both created by ex-pats as a reminder of home. How wonderful!

Vinicius’ map is very colourful and stylish, helped along by a bright palette and what looks very much like the Toronto Subway’s Art Deco-styled corporate typeface. It’s rather lovely, and looks great set in all caps, something I’m not always in favour of.

The balance between stylised route lines and geographical grounding is deftly handled: there’s a real sense of place to this map, and Vitória’s island nature is illustrated nicely.

A few minor points: the way the purple “V” line integrates with the other lines at Andorinhas is a little awkward: there should be a simpler solution than this. 

The station dots at Jardim Limoeiro are the only set that aren’t at a standard angle: this wouldn’t be a problem in itself as they’re just following the curve of the lines around the corner. However, it’s unfortunate that the dots are so close to the dashed grey line below it, as this really highlights the non-standard angle.

Finally, the southern end of the apple green “L” line seems to extend too far past the terminus station in comparison to other line ends.

All in all, a very attractive and stylish fantasy map. Great work!

Historical Cutaway View: Proposed State Street Subway, Chicago, c.1940

April 13, 2017
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Here’s a fantastic (if slightly idealised) view of the then still-under-construction State Street Subway from a c.1940 postcard. This view looks northward along State Street from Adams, and shows the Monroe-Adams mezzanine. Note the direct access from the mezzanine level to the basement level of businesses on either side of State Street – now long since closed.

Text on the reverse side of the postcard reads:

Cut-away view of Chicago’s subway in the Central Business District. Shown are the main tubes; the downtown center platform, which is 3500 feet long; the two-way escalators to the mezzanines with store connections; and the State St. surface level. Features of the subway are ventilation, illumination, escalators, safety, comfort.

Source: CERA Chicago website – link no longer active

Submission – Fantasy Map: Harrisburg Area Rapid Transit by James Gibbons

April 13, 2017
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Submitted by James, who says:

This is a dream/concept I have for light rail transit in the Harrisburg, PA region. For a rather small metro area, there is pretty bad traffic, and oddly spaced suburban development of varying densities. I believe light rail transit in the region would spur more responsible developments and relieve traffic on both back roads and expressways, while encouraging walking. The system focuses on connecting suburban communities with the central core and other high density job or leisure destinations.

Transit Maps says:

This is a rather nice little map that James has made here, depicting a realistically-sized light rail system for the city it might serve. The downtown loops remind me a lot of Denver’s light rail, or even Portland’s back when the Yellow Line ran along Morrison and Yamhill, looping back around at 10th Avenue.

James has taken a fairly diagrammatic approach, using 30-degree multiples, which gives a nice, dynamic feeling to the map. The angled routes help him place his labels quite efficiently, though this can make the labels on the horizontal routes look a little tightly packed in comparison. In general, I do think that some work could be done to even out the spacing between labels: they’re quite bunched in some sections, but there are some large, uneven gaps as well. The northern leg of the Green line stands out most in that regard for me, going loose-gap-tight-loose once it diverges from the Purple line.

With diagrams like this, I really like to see if I can create a visual “hook” out of the arrangement of lines: a compositional axis or design feature that helps hold the whole thing together as a unified piece. On James’ map, I keep looking at the way the Green and Purple lines almost come together as a “wine bottle” shape to the top right of the map. If that shape could be made a little more visually attractive – by making the shape more symmetrical and having the two lines join to each other at the same place, for example – then it could be this diagram’s hook. Sometimes, further investigation of shapes, patterns, grids and axes are required to find the most harmonious arrangement of elements.

James’ HART logo is a really sweet concept, though I think it could use some tweaking to make that “love heart” shape a little more even and symmetrical.

Overall, definitely a very solid effort that’s worthy of some further exploration and refinement.

See also: a future DC Metrorail map by James (November 2015).

Historical Map: Philadelphia Rapid Transit Co. Trackage Map, 1910

April 13, 2017
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What appears at first glance to be a street map of Philadelphia in the early 20th century is actually not what it seems. All this map depicts is streetcar track and mainline railroads (in traditional ticked lines), showing how incredibly dense the streetcar network was at the time, especially downtown. Interestingly, a lot of the system appears to be single-track only.

Nowadays, only a few vestigial trolley lines recall the days when streetcars reigned supreme in Philly.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Submission – Future Map: Auckland Congestion Free Network Map v2.0

April 11, 2017
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Submitted by Greater Auckland, who says:

I’d like to submit our new future Auckland regional transit map for a good brutally honest frisking! We follow your blog and you’ll see more than a few design cues have been picked up from your work.

This was done by Greater Auckland (formerly TransportBlog) to promote the revised Congestion Free Network Plan.

This network plan takes the best parts of the official Auckland multi-decade plan – the rapid transit of course! – and shows the system Auckland could have within 10 or 15 years… if the most of the public transport project funding was brought forward and the motorways and highways pushed back. About 30% of this is already existing, 60% planned by the city (eventually), and 10% invented by Greater Auckland.

The map is based on the ‘official’ planning map from the government (see page 23 of this document (PDF) but has been thoroughly improved to make it look like a real life map on a metro station wall.

It is designed as a A2 poster so some of the detail is quite small. In our recent fundraising drive we sold over a hundred copies at $100 a piece, so if you have any major comments let us know asap before we go to print!

The launch post with links is here. The map PDF can be found here, and the report that goes with it here.

Transit Maps says:

First off, the report that supports this map is rather wonderful, and a great read for those who are interested in such things. Auckland’s transit is already undergoing quite a transformation, and documents like this help continue that conversation into the future.

The map itself is quite lovely, I must say. The diagrammatic lines have been integrated with the geographical coastline quite expertly, although this does necessarily mean that the central portion of the map is a little cramped in comparison with the outer reaches. It’s only really a problem on the section of the green Western line between Baldwin Avenue and Mount Eden, which really does feel like things have been jammed in where they fit.

In general, I’m not the biggest advocate of colour-matching station labels with their respective lines: I always think it makes the map look more disjointed, and makes some lines look visually stronger than others just by virtue of having the darkest colour. It’s almost always the biggest problem with routes that are yellow, as the labels are much lighter than all the others. In a map like this, I’d prefer all the similar labels to be one colour. The attractive dark blue/grey used for interchange stations would work nicely for the rail/BRT stations, while an ever-so-slightly darker blue would make the ferry labels a little more visible against the background. At the moment, the labels are a little too tonally similar to the blue water fill for my liking.

After that, I’d just take a look at some of the label placement. Some are a little close to the route lines: Balmoral sits higher than Epsom, for example, and Orakei clips its route line as it goes around the curve. Shift it a tiny bit to the right and this won’t happen… that kind of little fix makes all the difference in the end.

Our rating: Overall, this is great work – clean, modern and inviting – that provides an inspiring look at the future of rapid transit in Auckland. Three stars!

Submission – Fantasy Map: Vitória Transit Network, Brazil by Frederico

April 10, 2017
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Submitted by Frederico, who says:

This is a diagram for a fantasy network serving my hometown, Vitória, Brazil – my first try designing a transit map.

If you showed this to a local, they would laugh at you – that’s because the city doesn’t have any type of rapid transit (not even bus lanes), even though it has almost 2 million habitants. The local government has been promising a BRT system more or less following the blue, orange and purple lines routes on this map for years, but it never went beyond a project. For most locals, a subway line is really impossible to imagine becoming real in a lifetime. So I thought I could bring this kind of utopia to the diagram and tried to give it a tongue-in-cheek feel using modular elements and childish colors.

This project also has a funny story behind it. I started concepting it 2 years ago, right after I returned from a trip to Lisbon, Portugal. I was in the middle of a depression, and on this trip I got to know some internet friends I have had since 2006 and really fell in love with the city and its “big city but suburban heart” sense. As you can imagine, my depression got even worse when I went back home, and when you are so dissatisfied about your life you can’t help but imagining a reality that is different in every aspect.

That’s when the idea of this map came through. One of the aspects of my life I thought that could be different was my commute: going to and back from work by bus, I imagined how my trip would be if my city had a subway, and even thinking of the voice of the Lisbon Metro announcing the names of the stations that a Vitória subway would have.

One of my other inspirations was the Los Angeles Metro identity. Their new designation system helped me identify the problems of color-based line naming and inspired me to create a system with different shapes for each type of service (bus, subway, ferry etc) and a different icon for each line, without using letters for designation which I find kind of boring.

I first started drawing a draft of the network on Paint (!), then switched to Illustrator and drew on top of a (terrible) map of the city I found on the city hall’s website. My main inspiration was, of course, Lisbon – I wasn’t really inspired to create anything at the time so I just tried to apply Lisbon’s metro map elements to mine. Most of them are still present here, such as the typeface, iconography and subway lines and its stations dots.

As I improved my designing abilities, I started changing the map to my taste, and eventually it became a diagram. I think I still suck on Illustrator, though, and if you edit the pdf you can see that it has many patches and shapes with wrong points that I didn’t know how to fix and ended up just putting a square on top to hide it. That was also one of the reasons why I chose to use this modular and squarey design: I didn’t have the patience to draw rounded curves on the angles! 

Looking back on the last two years, much changed: me and my friend who I met in Lisbon started dating long-distance, and eventually I moved here to live with him. So, maybe I also tried to put in this diagram the thing that really summarize my last two years: the feeling of being divided between two cities and trying to combine them two. I know… it’s a stupid thing to try to project into a transit map 🙂

Well, I hope you enjoy it, and sorry for the very long text. And thank you for this blog, it really has been a great inspiration for me.

Transit Maps says:

Sometimes, the story behind a map is perhaps even more interesting than the map itself. On the face of it, Frederico’s fantasy map is a pretty standard reworking of the design themes of the well-known Lisbon Metro diagram (which I wrote about way, way back in November 2011), with a few elements of the LA Metro map added to distinguish between modes. 

(Interestingly, Frederico has got his hands on a copy of the Lisbon Metro’s bespoke typeface, Metrolis, which certainly helps complete the illusion.)

However, it’s the meaning behind this work that makes it special, a juxtaposition of two places and the memories of each. It’s a very personal piece and that far outweighs the way the map might look. 

Historical Map: Underground Map at Strand Station, 1937

March 31, 2017
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Passers-by looking at a pre-H.C. Beck Underground map outside Strand station in 1937. At a glance, it looks like the Fred Stingemore map, but expanded to show the whole system (the pocket card only showed central London). Parkland also seems to have been added – the large dark blotches dotted all around the map.

Source: Londonist.com

Historical Map: Proposed Franklin Street Subway Line, Chicago, 1977

March 30, 2017
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In the late 1960s, Chicago actually seriously considered knocking down the elevated parts of the “L” and replacing it all with a modern subway network. The plan originally called for multiple lines, but these got whittled down over the years for a variety of reasons – lack of funding being one of the major ones.

By 1977, all that remained on the table was the Franklin Street Subway, shown in red in the handsome illustrated map above. It would have cut across to the western side of the Loop and passed directly under Sears Tower, which apparently was built to allow basement-level access to a planned station there. In effect, the subway would have acted as a downtown relief line, offering an alternative north-south corridor through the city.

This map was featured in the 1977 annual report for the Chicago Urban Transportation District (CUTD), the body created to oversee the project and raise some capital for it via a local sales tax. Note the white area on the map: this shows the district where the tax would have been levied.

By 1979, rising costs and shrinking funding sources sounded the death knell for the project, and the “L” continues to rise high above the streets of downtown Chicago.

Source: Chicago “L”.org website – lots more information about the history of this abandoned project here!

Update: Correspondent Dennis McClendon has provided the following information about the map’s creator, which is great to know:

We might mention the actual cartographer: Eugene Derdeyn, whose Perspecto Maps created similar Perspectovision oblique views-to-the-curved-horizon for a number of clients in the Chicago area. I think Derdeyn died in the 1990s and his daughter updated selected projects for a few more years.

Submission – Proposed Official Map: BaltimoreLink System Map, 2017

March 28, 2017
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Submitted by Ryan VanSickle and Christian Hurst. Ryan says:

I’d like to submit the official proposed BaltimoreLINK system map.  In addition to its frequency mapping and radial design (something I haven’t seen much in official maps from transit agencies), it’s got a few features that indicate a sense of humor – monsters in Chesapeake Bay, and Lil’ Linky the advice bus.  There’s no elaborate compass rose to match the tallship and giant octopus, though.

The radial design seems to reflect an emphasis on new connections that don’t require travel downtown.  The proposed bus network redesign is portrayed using a few methods – color-coded CityLink routes (new frequent limited-stop services), and thicknesses/hashing on other routes to indicate frequency.  Interestingly, the light rail and Metro Subway lines have been somewhat de-emphasized to thinner black lines and left out of the frequency mapping.

Transit Maps says:

Frustratingly, this diagram is only available on the project website as a medium-resolution JPG, and much of the type and detail is therefore too small to be easily legible. While I understand that this is just a draft diagram and is subject to change, it’s disappointing that a zoomable format like a PDF hasn’t been used. 

As it is, much of the workings of the proposed network remain a mystery to me, though it can be determined that the thick, brightly-coloured routes are frequent CityLink buses running from the suburbs to downtown, supported by radial LocalLink routes, shown in grey. There are also Express BusLink services, which provide limited stop service to downtown as well as making an express ring around the periphery of the city. More on the proposed network here.

What’s really noticeable about this diagram its hybrid nature – a rigid street grid in the core, but a radial diagram in the outlying areas. The transition between the two styles is actually handled very deftly, and there’s still a good natural flow between the two. I also quite like the large airplane denoting the BWI branch of Baltimore’s light rail system: an instant visual indicator of the line’s destination. It looks quite dynamic, almost rocketing off the bottom of the page.

I’m less enamoured with the sea monster in the bay: a quixotic touch that seems a little out of place on such a modern-looking diagram. Almost venturing into “Here be Dragons” territory…

Our rating: Overall, this looks quite promising, although it’s hard to tell for sure without being able to read the legend properly. A tentative three stars at present.

Source: Maryland MTA website

Submission – Cutaway Diagram of the Paris Métro’s Opéra Station, 1910

March 9, 2017
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Submitted by thesandpeople100, who says:

Cutaway diagram of the Paris Metro’s Opera station. I came across this working on a project for a hypothetical addition to Palais Garnier but couldn’t find any information on its origin. Any ideas?

Transit Maps says:

A reverse image search on Google found the answer to this pretty quickly: this beautiful cutaway appeared in the July 1910 issue of Popular Mechanics. Unfortunately, this month isn’t available in Google Books’ archive of back issues of the magazine, but there are some good details about the article on this web page (scroll down to get to the cutaway).

The author seemed pretty impressed by what he saw in Paris back in 1910:

Of all the wonderful engineering work done by the Metropolitan underground railways of Paris, the most complicated is that under the Place de l’Opera, where three great tubes cross each other, all of which must have station facilities in the crossing’s tangle. The three tubes, the platform, stairways, and elevators constitute a veritable Chinese puzzle, and the wonder is that the congested underground and overhead traffic has not been even more disturbed during the work.