Submission – Unofficial Future Map: Sound Transit Network, Puget Sound, 2041 by Zachary Newell

February 8, 2017
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Submitted by Zachary, who says:

This map is based on voter-approved expansions to the Seattle area’s light rail network and represents what the system should look like in 2041 when the extensions are finished. The light rail, which currently has two separate lines (one runs from the University of Washington area through downtown Seattle and on to the airport; the other is a short segment in Tacoma), will grow to a sprawling system connecting the entire region. Sound Transit’s plans do not indicate how many separate lines there will be so I made guesses based on the information they’ve made available (I did make a silly guess in my first draft where I included something of an express line…before realizing that there isn’t track capacity to support that). Existing commuter rail lines, express buses, and a proposed Bus Rapid Transit line will help connect spots that the light rail won’t quite reach. 

The map is stylistically based off of a “stylized system map” hidden away on Sound Transit’s website. It is from that that I included the ST Express bus lines with their route call-outs at each station, something I didn’t intend to do originally but something that seemed very useful on Sound Transit’s map and I like how it turned out on mine. The line colors are also based on the colors of Sound Transit’s map to give a sense of continuity… although I do really like Oran Viriyincy’s choices on his Seattle Transit Map (which shows detailed current services); he went for colors based on local culture. 

This is my second transit map and the first made using a real graphics design program (although you might notice that I’m not exactly proficient at curves in Inkscape…I’ll just claim for now that it was a stylistic choice; my first map was a Budapest system map made in PowerPoint so I think I’m doing better). I’m really glad that there’s a place to send these where there’s opportunity for viewing and feedback; thanks!

Information about the expansions here.
And Sound Transit’s current, albeit hidden, map here (link no longer active).

Transit Maps says:

For only your second map (and first with a real graphics program!), this is really good, Zachary! Definitely work on adding curves to route line corners: it always helps a map flow better, in my opinion. Hard corners like you have here create a jerky, staccato effect, where your eyes stop and start while following route lines. However, apart from the lack of curves, you’ve done a great job following the style of the official Sound Transit schematic you reference above – I can definitely see this as a future progression of that map!

Now for the bad news.

Unfortunately, you’ve interpreted the plans for the downtown segment incorrectly. You’ve drawn your map as if all the lines will be routed down the current Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel (DSTT), but they’re actually going to dig a whole new tunnel to carry the Ballard extension. The new tunnel will start between the Smith Cove and Seattle Center stations, and will interchange with the existing station at Westlake before crossing over to 5th or 6th Avenue (final routing TBD) and the new Midtown station (probably at around Madison Street). Ballard trains can’t stop at University Street or Pioneer Square, simply because they’re over in the DSTT. 

The new tunnel will join back to the main trunk at International District/Chinatown station, where trains from Ballard will continue down to the Airport and beyond, while trains from Everett/UW will now go to West Seattle – Zachary gets that new service pattern correct on his map. I believe that East Link trains will use the DSTT in the future as the infrastructure currently being built ties into that tunnel.

One curious thing to note is that only West Seattle trains will call at Stadium once these lines are finished; Airport trains will skip this station. (Though I wonder if that will still hold true on game days for the Sounders, Mariners or Seahawks – it seems strange to not provide direct light rail service on both lines to Stadium station then.)

The configuration described above is shown in the ST3 map Zachary references above, but it’s not drawn particularly clearly. I only understand it because I’ve had it explained to me in great detail by transit engineers.

I’m not as familiar with the Issaquah extension, but I think that what Zachary has drawn is right. I feel sure that followers from Seattle will be quick to point out any other errors…

So Zachary’s challenge is to take what he’s done and reconfigure and improve upon it. I look forward to seeing the next version!

Question: How can I simplify a transit map with a lot of concurrent routes?

February 8, 2017
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QHi, I want to make a map of my home city’s bus system, but as I am a ‘starter’ I have some problems with developing it. In our city centre, there is one bus stop with 24 routes and another with 22 (excluding the night routes). Between these two stops, the lines run along two streets with 10 and 11 routes , respectively. What would you advise me to do to not have a big mess in the middle of the map? I’d really appreciate an answer.

A That’s quite a problem, Anonymous, and probably one that’s not able to be resolved in a way that gives you an attractive, usable map: it’s just too many routes in a confined space to be practicable. For an example of how terrible your map might look, check out the old bus map for Luxembourg City before Jug Cerovic made a far superior one for them. You simply can’t run that number of bus routes in parallel with each other and expect your map to work.

So you need to think of a way to group like services together on your map to reduce the number of route lines passing through your densest area. This can be by service type (local, express, limited, long-distance) or by destination (buses to the north as one group, buses to the south as another, etc.). For good examples of this type of map, check out the current Luxembourg City bus map and the new Utrecht bus map (both by Jug Cerovic) which group routes by destination, and the bus map for Spokane, Washington by CHK America, which groups by service type. The new Muni map for San Francisco (which I haven’t actually written about on the blog) is also a great example of mapping a bus network in a modern style.

Hope this gets you started!

Submission – Official Map: Uithoflijn Tram Strip map, Utrecht, The Netherlands

February 7, 2017
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Submitted by Fabian Wegewijs, Coordinator of Travel Information for U-OV, who says:

In 2018 a new streetcar will run between the Central Station of Utrecht and the university area of Utrecht (De Uithof). This Uithoflijn will have 7 intermediate stops, and its termini will be the Central Station on one end and a major park + ride on the other. Twenty seven new trams have been ordered from CAF, the first of which has arrived at the depot in Nieuwegein in December 2016 for testing. All vehicles will be 32 meters long. During daytime they’ll run coupled, with a total capacity of some 550 passengers per run. We’ll provide a frequency of 16 runs per hour, creating a capacity of almost 9.000 passengers per hour in each direction.

For this new line we’ve made a strip map. One will be placed above every other door in the vehicles, alternating with our house rules. Icons show some information about each stop. We’ve followed your often repeated advice to place the stop names horizontal, to make them easy to read. The colours (red and orange) at the lines termini are shown on all U-OV transit information, including stop signs, brochures, digital information screens and the vehicles destination display. With this system people can see by colour (eight in total) which way the tram or bus is going, or they can (intuitively) filter out all lines that do not go in their direction.

I’m very curious as to what you think of this map.

Transit Maps says:

As always, I love getting maps directly from transit agencies for review, so thanks to Fabian for sending another map my way! This is a solid, no-nonsense strip map here: no bells and whistles, just clear communication of information.

The use of colour to quickly and visually denote the tram’s final destination is interesting (U-OV’s site explains this here in Dutch), though I do wonder why it doesn’t carry across to the directional arrows at the bottom of the map? It seems like the “Centrum” arrow and text could be red and the “De Uithof” arrow and text could be in the same shade of orange as the label on the map. If the arrows are meant to stand alone, then perhaps grey would work better than a non-committal colour.

My only other comment is in regard to the “hospital” and “park-and-ride” icons, which exhibit something I’m seeing a bit more of lately – a curious need to place an icon in a shape that’s inside another shape. The “H” for “hospital” is in a rounded-edge box which sits inside another box (which just seems unnecessarily recursive to me), while the “P+R” is in a circle in a box. Both would be graphically simpler if the symbol sat within one shape only, and the P+R icon could even just be a circle to quickly visually differentiate it from the other “destination” icons. The icons do their job as they are, but I always think that simpler is better for this kind of thing.

Our rating: Solid work that fits within an overall wayfinding strategy without being spectacular. Three stars.

Unofficial Map: “Spoorslag 70″-style Map of Intercity Trains in the Netherlands, 2017 by AS Veen

February 1, 2017
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The lovely 1970 Dutch train map featured in my previous post was brought to my attention by the author of this map – a pitch-perfect recreation of the current IntercIty network in the old map’s style. Apart from a bit of welcome clean-up to the islands at bottom left (a big improvement in the clarity of the cartography here), everything else is faithfully rendered – including the odd little notch taken out of the south bank of the Afsluitdijk, which I can’t really see a reason for on either map.

Veen notes that Nederlandse Spoorwegen still uses the “A” through “H” designations from the 1970s for Intercity lines today, so there’s quite a bit of commonality between the two maps. There’s some extra granularity in the modern network, as most of the letters are broken up into “a” and “b” sub-designations as well. Veen shows this by giving related lines similar colours, which works quite effectively. There’s also a few “non-letter” IC routes that have been worked in quite nicely as well. I don’t think Veen’s thicker station ticks are quite as elegant as the hairline ones used in the 1970s map, but they do the job.

Overall, a thoughtful adaptation of an old map’s style to show the current system. A fun design exercise, and very deftly executed.

Source: AS Veen/Flickr

Historical Map: “Spoorslag 70″ Intercity Trains Map, The Netherlands

February 1, 2017
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A rather lovely minimalist diagram of Intercity trains in The Netherlands as introduced by the Spoorslag 70 plan, an effort at modernising and standardising passenger train travel in that country. 

The coastline at the bottom left gets a little complex compared to the simplicity of the rest of the map, and all the type is angled (but at least all on the same axis!), but otherwise this is really quite lovely. The single thin black tick across the route lines to indicate a station is simple and effective, even on stations like Utrecht with multiple lines passing through.

Our rating: Fantastic early-1970s European design. Clean and elegant. Four-and-a-half stars!

Source: Wikimedia Commons – I’ve cleaned up and brightened the picture for publication a bit

Submission – Official Map: New York MTA Connections to LaGuardia Airport

January 26, 2017
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Submitted by Henry, who says:

I stumbled upon this diagram of MTA services available from the MTA. While the general positioning of the lines looks like it’s very clean and has very good bones, the small design decisions (like the shape of transfer points to subway and commuter rail, the rail tickmarks, etc.) make this map feel very cheap and tacky.

Transit Maps says:

I’m not really feeling this map at all, Henry… not the least because it appears to be a poor-quality image (A scan of a printed page? Surely not!) that has had both sides cropped off: note that labels and the legend are truncated on both sides… oops! That’s pretty poor work for a major transit agency like the MTA.

It appears to have been produced in the short window between the reopening of the “W” (November 7, 2016) and the opening of the Second Avenue Subway with its rerouting of the “Q” (January 1, 2017) – so it already needs an update to be accurate, as the SAS is missing entirely.

The map itself is an uncomfortable blend of the regular subway map – geography, colours, typefaces, tickmarked railroads for Metro-North and the LIRR, etc. – and a stylised transit diagram. This means we get accurate outlines for parkland (and, bizarrely, all the roads within Central Park and on Randalls and Wards Islands!), but also simplified route lines which omit most intermediate stations in favour of highlighting connection points. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as most users will effectively orient themselves using these “landmark” interchanges, and it does handle tourist trips between the airport and Manhattan quite well.

As Henry says, the attention to detail on this map is somewhat lacking – best illustrated by the oddly tiny interchange marker at 63rd Drive/Rego Park. Also, the note at the bottom of the map about late night/weekend service seems to use a different point size for the first line, suggesting that it was edited after the initial version to add the “W” to the list of affected lines and the type had to get smaller to squeeze everything in.

Our rating: Something of a neglected afterthought without much love or care applied to it. Two stars.

Source: MTA website (PDF)

Submission – Strip Map for the New Moscow Central Circle Line by ArtLebedev Studios

January 23, 2017
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Submitted by Sergey, who also drew my attention to the recently-revised schematic for the entire Moscow Metro as well. However, this new strip map for the Central Circle Line really caught my eye, as it’s a fascinating approach to solving a very difficult problem: how do you concisely show a loop line (with a lot of stations!) in the narrow confines of a railcar strip map?

ArtLebedev’s solution is to view the circular line from an oblique perspective: with the circle compressed vertically into a shallow oval. As seen in the second image above, the labels and other design elements are all also viewed from the same viewpoint, creating an effective illusion of depth and space, augmented by the visually clever little “flip” of the circle as it moves from the front edge to the back. Elegantly, Moscow’s centre is simply indicated by a small red star in the middle of the ellipse.

The glowing red drop shadow that defines the edges of the white route line seems a little ostentatious – and might perhaps make the map age badly when this type of effect isn’t so much in vogue in a few years – but it does work well to differentiate this line from other Metro lines on the full system map.

Our rating: A stylish, visually attractive way of depicting a circular route in a limited space. Creates an almost three-dimensional space instead of a flat planar map. Great work as always from this studio – four stars!

Source: ArtLebedev website – as always, a great walkthrough of the design process, and a look at newly redesigned strip maps for other Metro lines as well.

Submission – Helsinki Metro Map, 1982 versus Current Map

January 18, 2017
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Submitted by sailsandrails, who says:

I’ve been meaning to ask you this for a while: what is your opinion of the original styling of Helsinki’s Metro map?

(Photo taken from this site, unfortunately I couldn’t find a better one). After several revisions, the current version looks like this, which is more international in style.

Personally, I think the original is surprisingly readable while being pleasantly unique in style, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Transit Maps says:

I definitely agree – the original map (dating from 1982, the year the Helsinki Metro opened) is quite charming. Yes, the map is simple – a single line with just nine stations – but it turns that simplicity into a virtue and creates something quite elegant and stylish. The unusual station markers – just a gap between line segments – are very effective and help form a grid for the informational text both above and below the line. The bus numbers beneath the line are beautifully typeset, with numbers right-aligned, but with the letter suffixes offset to the right for easy reference: I love this sort of attention to detail!

What I like most of all is that the designers have totally resisted trying to make their little system look more impressive by adding extraneous detail: something that other single line transit systems have been guilty of over the years. If there’s one tiny flaw, it’s that the last station name to the right is cut off by the frame around the map. The stylish minimalist wayfinding signage above the map adds to the appeal as well.

The modern map is very competent, but it just doesn’t have the same sort of confident verve that the original map has. Rather, it uses a lot of standard transit map design elements – circles for stations, slightly rounded curves, a friendly sans serif typeface – to create something that feels comfortable and blandly familiar. The station labels set at a 90-degree angle are also a little harder to read than the original 45-degree angled type.

An interesting progression for sure! Four stars for the old map, 3 for the new.

Project: 1954 Manhattan Rapid Transit Flow Diagram Digital Recreation

January 17, 2017
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I’ve long admired this beautiful 1954 flow diagram of subway service into Manhattan during the morning peak hour, so I set myself the personal challenge of recreating it using modern design tools (Adobe Illustrator) while still staying true to the original principles of the map.

While it was certainly possible to just trace the source material in Illustrator with the pen tool and end up with a decent facsimile of the original, there’s really nothing to be learned from doing so. I wanted to understand how the original diagram maker might have worked, and to see just how accurately the diagram represents the service numbers as shown on all the labels.

Using the map’s “Scale of Cars”, I was able to work out a formula that would give me the numerically accurate stroke width to use based on the numbers presented, which I then applied to all the different lines as shown on the map. The numbers held true throughout most of the map, with only the very thinnest lines (the lowest number of trains per hour) being slightly thickened on the map for clarity and ease of drawing. “Cheating” to get things to line up or add up only happens in a couple of locations across the map – mainly at complex junctions –  which is definitely a testament to the original designer’s skills.

Once I had drawn all my paths to the right width and placement for each subway division (BMT, IRT and IND), I expanded them out into polygons that I could then merge into compound paths for the final artwork. These shapes were then copied to a layer above the fills to be used as a basis for the black strokes used to define each route line.

Typography was actually pretty easy for this map, with everything being easily identifiable: Futura is the main labelling font, with the slab serif Rockwell being used for some locality information. Water features are labelled in Century Schoolbook Italic, and feature the only concession to modern design tools on the map – using a neat white stroke behind each letter to separate it from the stippled background rather than the clumsy cut-out rectangles of the original. Finding a good match for the Art Deco borough names was perhaps the hardest task – Neutraface isn’t exactly perfect, but it definitely evokes the right feeling.

A quick note on mid-century typography here: tracking is generally much looser than what we’re used to with modern digital typesetting (a setting of +60 to +80 in Illustrator’s Character palette was often required to get type to match the original, along with a fair bit of manual kerning), and word spacing is positively enormous, being just shy of two standard-width spaces in most cases, or close to an em-space. A couple of things to bear in mind if you’re ever after that “1950s look” to your typography!

After the hard work of drawing the route lines, it was then just a matter of tediously adding all the labels, arrows and underlying geography to the map. The stipple effect used for the water matches the original very nicely, and is actually a cartographic Illustrator pattern swatch that normally represents sandy areas on a map. The water “contours” are offset copies of the coastline path: on the original map, these would have been drawn by hand.

Overall, recreating this map was very enjoyable and instructive, and the end result is certainly quite beautiful. Let me know what you think of my efforts in the comments section below!

Historical Map: Sydney Rail Transport System Strip Map, c. mid-1970s

January 6, 2017
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Here’s a great old system map of Sydney’s suburban rail system from around the middle of the 1970s. It has to be from before 1978, as that’s the year that the Eastern Suburbs line opened, and it’s not shown here. I distinctly remember seeing a few of these in old “Red Rattler” carriages in the mid-to-late 1980s, so they lived on well past their “use by” date. As seen here, the maps lived above the windows in the main compartment of the carriage, and were quite large, around 5 feet by 1 foot or so. The noisy metal window blinds that gave the “Rattlers” their name are clearly visible below the map. 

As expected in a strip map like this, any relation to real-world geography is tenuous at best. South is to the left and north is at bottom right, but all the other lines have had to be splayed out to fit the narrow shape. In reality, the end of the orange East Hills line (top left) is quite close to Macquarie Fields on the (dark) green Liverpool-Campbelltown line (top right). However, the topology of the network is indicated fairly clearly and the hub-and-spoke nature of the network of the time allows this treatment to work.

Also of note is the interesting treatment of the City Circle, with alternating dashes of each line’s colours to indicate how each one makes a circuit of the loop before heading back out to the suburbs via Central. It’s not actually very accurate, as there shouldn’t be any North Shore line pink from Wynyard to Central via Museum (this line always crosses the Harbour Bridge after Wynyard), but I doubt it was ever meant to give a realistic idea of service patterns.

It’s also kind of fun to see all the little branch lines off the Western line to the abbatoirs, Sandown and Rope’s Creek. Of these, only the Carlingford line remains today. Finally, it’s always great to see the glorious 1970s NSW Transport “arrow of indecision” as well! Every good rail system needs a logo with arrows pointing in opposite directions, right?

Our rating: An early prototype of future Sydney rail maps, with most of the route colours already in the form they’d be in for the next 20 years or so. Type’s quite small, but the layout is clear and easy to follow for such an extensive network. Three stars.

Source: Dave Murchie/Flickr