The other day, long-time correspondent Edward Russell tweeted a photo of a strip map he’d seen while on the Dallas Streetcar (left). It depicts the DART light rail system, telling riders that they can make a connection with that service at Union Station (at one end of the short streetcar line).
However, the execution of the map is almost comically poor: wobbly route lines, clashing labels, uneven spacing of stations and more. One of the longest routes on the map – the Trinity Railway Express (TRE) commuter rail to Fort Worth – is inexplicably scrunched up into the tiniest of spaces, making it look for all the world like it’s the streetcar line! While I acknowledge that fitting an entire rail system into a narrow strip map format can be challenging, I knew instantly that there had to be a better solution than this.
So here’s a quick two-hour reworking of the map to the same dimensions (as best as I can tell) and with type at the same size. The map now uses a very simple four-column grid, which allows all labels to be placed to the right of their corresponding route line: no clashing type here! The map is now also strictly diagrammatic. It’s impossible to even attempt to show geographical relationships in a distorted diagram like this, so why even try? All vertical elements are now placed the same distance apart from top to bottom, which nicely lines up all the stations into neat little rows. The one and only concession to geography was to place the TRE Medical/Market Center station along the horizontal part of its route in order to get it closer to the DART Orange/Green Line Market Center station, as they’re in close proximity in real life.
What else? I put on a DART logo, added a disclaimer that the map is not to scale (just in case!) and removed the redundant north pointer. I could probably work this up a little more, but I think I get this definitely gets the idea across. What do you think?
Over the Christmas break I was inspired by your E-Road Network Map, and wanted to create my own map. I chose the Asian Highway Network, a similar system to the E-Road network, as there seemed to be very few maps of the whole network, and the only ones I could find were either too high-level or too vast to easily read. This is my take on the network.
However, one thing I was not sure how to represent on the map was international borders, which I think would be more important in Asia than Europe, as without Schengen any route-planning would have to involve considering visas for travelling between countries. There is also the problem that some borders are completely closed, such as the North Korea | South Korea border on AH1 and AH6: how would you suggest that I show this?
Another issue I had while developing the map was fitting 45° angles into the grid system. I rounded these distances to the nearest ¹⁄₈ of the line width, but this did mean that it became harder and harder to stick to the major divisions of the grid as I developed the map further, and any diagonal distances are slightly different to the horizontal/vertical distances. Do you have any advice about this?
Transit Maps says:
Wow – you’ve certainly nailed the look and feel of my E-Road map, Xsanda! As a result, this makes a great companion piece to my previous work. I find it especially interesting that the two systems overlap somewhat to the west: Turkey, Russia and the Caucasas region would seem to have many roads that would be designated as both an E-Road and an Asian Highway, though signage as both would probably be pretty intermittent.
Also of interest is the numbering system: unlike E-Roads and US Interstates (which arrange numbers into a continent-spanning grid), the Asian Highway network uses numbers 1-9 to represent cross-continent routes, with two- and three-digit numbers grouped by region, as Xsanda explains:
Numbers 10-29 represent Southeast Asia, with 10-19 on the mainland, and 20-29 on the islands of Indonesia and the Philippines. Numbers 30-39 are located in Northeast Asia, and 40-59 are in South Asia, the Indian subcontinent. Numbers 60-69 are in Central Asia, 70-79 are in Iran and Afghanistan, and 80-89 are in Turkey and the Caucasus region.
Design-wise, international borders do present an interesting challenge, and I’m not afraid to admit that I intentionally left them off my map simply because it seemed like too much hard work. I also liked the idea of presenting a Europe unified by this network of highways, even though the Schengen Zone is much smaller than the total area of the map. You can take the plunge and add them, but be aware that the distortion of the landforms to fit the stylised look of the map will carry across to borders, which could result in some very odd-looking countries!
Regarding closed borders, they could be pretty easily indicated with an appropriate icon that’s explained in the legend – this could be a solid black bar or “X” across the highway at that point, or some other appropriate yet graphically simple symbol.
As for the grid, I wouldn’t worry too much about breaking it. On a map like this, it should really act as a guideline only: the more important thing is to make a map that feels balanced, and I think you’ve done a pretty good job! Now, what other continent-spanning highway networks need mapping?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
