Yeah, I think the Tokyo Subway map does this to a lot of people. From MariNaomi’s graphic memoir Turning Japanese.
Via: comiccartography Tumblr
Tokyo Subway Map from MariNaomi’s “Turning Japanese”
Jake Berman’s Unofficial New York Subway Map – on a Wall!
A wall-sized New York Subway map! Despite initial appearances, this is not based off the Vignelli map; rather, it appears to be a slightly modified or newer version of this map from Wikipedia. Anyone know an exact location for this?
Update: New information and a link to a story on Gothamist about this building, which is completely subway themed! The building is at 132A Stanhope Street in Brooklyn if you want to find it yourself. The map is by Jake Berman, and can be found on his blog, 53 Studio.
Source: mslovejoy/Tumblr – link no longer active
Historical Map: Budapest Metro Map, c. 1980s
A charmingly simple – almost naive – diagram of Budapest’s then three-line Metro as included in a fold-out city map brochure. The rippling water pattern for the rivers is rather lovely, as is the simple but effective three-circle depiction of the main interchange at Deák tér.
The use of large train and ferry icons to depict transportation interchanges is a little vague: the icons are large enough to span between some stations, or are placed so far away from the Metro station that it’s hard to tell if they’re actually in any sort of proximity to each other. The enormous Metro line numbers aren’t really helping, either… On the other hand, the airport is nowhere near as close to the eastern end of the M3 line as this map would have you believe.
Our rating: Quite charming despite its flaws, with a wonderfully austere 1980s Eastern European design aesthetic. Three stars.
Source: xoverit/Tumblr
Submission – Fantasy Map: Greater Brisbane Rail Map by Hayden Green
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Submitted by Hayden, who says:
This is a fantasy map of what one day could be the urban rail network in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. I’ve been working on this for the last few months, and many of your posts (especially tutorials) have been extremely helpful – I would love to hear your thoughts on the final product. Thanks 🙂
Transit Maps says:
Now this I like!
A fantasy map that’s not afraid to step out of the shadow of the fairly pedestrian official map (June 2014, 3 stars) and create something new. The thin route lines and generous curves reminds me of the Metro de Porto’s system map (April 2012, 3.5 stars). Hayden’s map does share one fault with that map, though – overall, I find the typography a little on the small side.
Wisely, Hayden has decided to limit the scope of the map to the Brisbane-only portion of southeast Queensland’s rail network, which enables him to show the city proper at a decent scale. For the regional parts of the network, Hayden makes liberal use of station lists pointing off the edges of the map. A couple of these lists are quite a lengthy read, but overall, this approach works quite well.
The use of extra angles help Hayden piece together the network quite convincingly and there’s a nice languid flow to the whole map. Even the convoluted path of the Brisbane River seems calmer on this map than on the official one. I often talk about getting the route lines and background to match stylistically to make the map look like a unified whole, and Hayden’s done an excellent job here of doing just that.
I’m a little less convinced by the zone boundary treatment, which seems a little ostentatious and showy compared to the restrained minimalism of the rest of the map. A simpler way of numbering the two zones could be found with a little work, I think. Similarly, I find the thick blue border around the legend to be too heavy and visually dominant.
Overall, though, this is really excellent work – a fresh look at a potential future for Brisbane! Nice work, Hayden!
Submission – Icons of the Fukuoka City Subway, Japan
Submitted by Zeroplate, who says:
I was in Fukuoka this summer and couldn’t help but admire the icons that the subway lines used to mark each station. Some like the elephant and the ramen bowl tied clearly to local attractions. Others pointed to historical or geographical notes about the city. Still others I never figured out. Since each station in the main part of town was labeled with kanji, hiragana, Roman letters, and an icon, the maps got sorta busy but I enjoyed the whimsy they added to the traveling experience. I’m curious about whether you’ve seen these before and what you think of them.
Transit Maps says:
I haven’t actually seen these before, so thanks for sharing!
While the icons themselves are a bit of a mixed bag – some seem to belong to a family, while others have their own different style – they certainly liven up these strip maps. They’re definitely a contrast to Lance Wyman’s famous icons for the Mexico City Metro, which are all designed using a common design language and therefore have a uniformity to them that these icons lack. Of the icons shown here, my favourite is the double-headed pen/pencil “N” at Nishijin – lovely!
And you’re right about the maps being a little busy, but incorporating an icon, three different scripts and a station identification number will do that! At least you can’t complain that you’re not getting enough information…
Review: Mini Metro for Mobile Devices
While Dinosaur Polo Club’s Mini Metro – the minimalistic subway building game – has been available for PC via the Steam gaming portal for some time now, it’s only just been ported to mobile devices in the last couple of weeks. Always on the lookout for a fun little game to while away my commute to work, I picked it up for my iPhone almost immediately. Really, how could someone who runs a blog called Transit Maps resist this one?
At its heart, the game is incredibly simple: connect the differently-shaped station symbols with subway lines to move as many little “commuters” to their desired destination as possible before overcrowding forces your system to grind to a horrible, WMATA-esque halt. Square commuters want to go to a square station, circles to circles and so on.
Where Mini Metro really shines is in the superb execution of that simple concept. The subway map aesthetic is quite lovely, and the look of each of the different playable maps is tweaked slightly to match that city’s actual subway map. For example, New York is presented against a geographical backdrop, while the background for Paris is just the right shade of beige. In my opinion, Montreal should always be played in the game’s reduced-contrast “night mode” for the properly authentic look, as seen above.
The pitch-perfect look to the game is augmented by the lovely sound design, which uses the whirring of little train engines, the satisfied pings of commuters arriving at their destination and the warning chimes of overcrowded stations to build a dreamy, immersive soundscape that’s definitely an integral part of the gameplay.
The game works quite well with the touch interface of an iPhone: dragging out new routes with your finger is intuitive and fun. Deleting sections of track or performing major rerouting can be a little trickier at first, but I soon got the hang of it.
I only have an iPhone 5, so the small screen can make things a bit fiddly when there are lots of lines and stations. You can pinch to zoom to get in closer, but this sometimes accidentally reroutes tracks if you’re not careful where you put your fingers! Pause the game to make major adjustments and you should be fine. Larger screens on newer phones and tablets should run into this problem less often. Cleverly, the game almost imperceptibly zooms out as the game progresses, so you never see more of the map than you need at the time.
The game comes with 13 playable maps: earn a high enough score on the first few maps and you can unlock new cities to play. The differences between the cities aren’t just aesthetic: there are city-specific nuances in gameplay as well. Some cities offer different upgrades to your infrastructure, while others present their own unique challenges. I don’t want to give too much away here and spoil all the fun, but it is definitely worth playing to unlock all the different cities: everyone will have their own favourite city that suits their playing style. Personally, I particularly like Melbourne and Osaka, while I find Cairo quite maddening. There’s also a “Hardcore” mode, where any track you lay down is permanent – no do-overs!
Average game time for me at the moment is 15 to 20 minutes per game, which is perfect for whiling away a bus or train ride to work. This isn’t a deep simulation like SimCity or Cities in Motion, it’s a fun little strategic puzzle game dressed up like a subway map. It looks great, sounds great, and is a lot of fun to play. Highly recommended!
Price for the phone/tablet version: $4.99 for the whole game. No ads, no micro-transactions. That’s less than the price of a Venti Pumpkin Spice Latte, and a whole lot more fun!
Source: Dinosaur Polo Club
Submission – Official Map: Houston METRORail In-Car Strip Map
Submitted by Chris Bastian, who says:
Houston light rail map (2016); one core line (red); two spurs (green/purple) with planned extensions shown.
Transit Maps says:
I can understand that METRO is proud of their two new lines, but at this point they’ve been open for almost a year and a half. I think we can lose the awkward “NOW OPEN” shaded boxes now and reserve that treatment solely for the future two-station extension to the Green Line. The shading is especially egregious where it overlaps the yellow “see inset” arrow… more on that inset later.
The complately vertical labels for most of the stations is also unfortunate: I can imagine everyone on the train turning their heads to the left to read them! Having one half of the labels along the Red Line sitting below the line and the other half above it – to allow room to put the METRO logo in the bottom right corner – also makes it harder to count stops along the line. The logo could move pretty easily to at the top right if the north pointer was shifted or resized, and labels set at a 45-degree angle would certainly be easier on the neck to read!
The inset! A great idea to show more detail where the all the lines intersect, but it’s very confusingly implemented. The main interchange is actually three separate platforms offset by about a city block or so. Northbound and southbound Red Line trains call at Central Station Main; westbound Green and Purple trains stop around the corner at Central Station Capitol, while eastbound Green and Purple trains use Central Station Rusk. The inset shows this arrangement fairly well, except it neglects to show the direction of travel along Capitol and Rusk streets for the Green and Purple lines! Even worse, both alignments have an arrow pointing eastbound (indicating the continuation of the lines off the edge of the inset), which makes things even more confusing. This is a really elementary thing to screw up quite so badly, and must be really, really annoying for those unfamiliar with the system.
Our rating: A stodgy, clunky map, with a horrendously flawed piece of wayfinding in its supposedly “clarifying” detail inset. Needs a rethink. One-and-a-half stars.
Transit Maps is Five!
Transit Maps is five today! (That’s like 80 in Internet Years, right?)
Thanks to everyone who has joined me on the journey so far – there’s still so much more to come. Check out the archive for a look at everything to date, or visit a random post for laughs!
All the best,
Cameron
Official Visualization: SFTMA Future Subways Heatmap
Remember back in August when the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) asked for the public’s input on where future subways in the city might run by means of an interactive “draw a subway map” tool?
Well, they’ve just released the collated results of that survey – which had some 2,600 respondents – as a heat map, and the results are certainly definitive. It would seem that almost everyone wants a subway line along the length of Geary Boulevard, with another major “crosstown” connection running south along 19th Avenue. An extension of the Central Subway to Fort Mason also seems popular, as is – if you combined all the disparate routes into one – a second Transbay Tube.
Though these corridors have been identified, there’s still a lot more planning and funding work to be done before any concrete plans start to take shape. Still, an interesting conclusion to this little public outreach exercise!
Source: SFconnect website
Unofficial Map: Miami-Dade Metrorail and Metromover by Peter Dovak
I love it when people take my criticism of a map and use it as inspiration to come up with an alternative solution. Having seen my recent review of the new official map (October 2016, 1.5 stars), Peter took it upon himself to redesign it – and quickly, taking less than a day to come up with his version.
Peter obviously agreed with a lot of my concerns about the official map, because he’s addressed pretty much all of them here: simplified coastline and route trajectories, an inset for the downtown Metromover, the placement of the Downtown Express “e” logo within the relevant station’s dot, and so on… it’s like he’s reading my mind! The overall effect is much improved: the map is very clear and easy to read, although the excision of bus route information means that a direct comparison between the two maps is difficult. (One could argue that the inclusion of a long list of bus numbers without any further information isn’t actually that useful, but I digress…)
There are a couple of minor things that could looked at to improve the map further. The maps’s legend is strangely split into two parts, one off to the left and one hiding underneath the Metromover inset: I think these could be combined into one unified box. There’s certainly plenty of space over to the left for it.
The little blue squiggle representing the Metromover on the main map is very nicely done, but the top part of it gets a little close to the “Culmer” label, which could lead some people to think that there’s some sort of Metrorail/Metromover connection there.
I’d move the “Brownsville” station up a little bit to balance the spacing of the labels a little better along that section. The “Tri-Rail” station name is a little cheaty, as the Metrorail station is named “Tri-Rail”, while the Tri-Rail station is called “Metrorail Transfer”, each indicating a connection to the other service at the respective stations. The official map doesn’t do such a good job of making this clear either, so I can understand any confusion on Peter’s behalf. Finally, I’m not really ever in favour of all-caps labels on transit maps (mixed case is easier to read and just looks better, I feel), although i know that Peter was just emulating the real map’s typography to show how it could work better.
Our rating: That’s better! Clean, modern, easy to read – everything the official map should be, and made in less than 24 hours! Three-and-a-half stars!
Source: Peter’s “Transit Oriented” website (no longer on-line)