The 2022 “Transit Maps” Gift Guide!

November 17, 2022
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Back after a long hiatus, here’s my comprehensive guide to transit map-related gifty goodness for the transportation lover in your life this holiday season!

Jump to the categories: Prints and Posters | Books | Other Gifts & Sites

Transit Map Prints and Posters

My favourite category, filled with creative original designs and beautiful replica vintage maps from around the world – mainly made by local small businesses that you help support with every purchase.

First off, the shameless promotional plug: visit the Transit Maps store for my own original designs and some beautifully-restored vintage maps. Look out for sales around Black Friday and in the lead up to Christmas for some great deals.
My original maps | Vintage maps

Andrew Smithers (or “Mr. Mappy” to his friends) has a great selection of his rail maps for sale on his Redbubble site, including some variants of his superbly detailed UK rail diagram.

European-based cartographer Mike Hall has a store of beautiful maps to explore; we’re particularly enamoured with his collection of original vintage-styled rail maps – just stunning!

Jug Cerovic’s impressive portfolio of “INAT” metro diagrams continues to grow each year, and you can buy many of them on his Redbubble store.

I’ve always loved Daniel Huffman’s series of transit maps of North American rivers – so much so that some of them are the only “guest artist” prints available in the Transit Maps store, but he’s made quite a few more than those! Check them out here in his storefront.

Michael Calcagno has been making transit maps for a long time – see his valuable contributions to nycsubway.org’s historical map collection – but he’s only started selling his creations relatively recently. His Etsy store is full of fantastic maps, including a lot of Vignelli-style diagrams of different cities.

Andrew “vanshnookenraggen” Lynch’s vanmaps.com has a wide selection of vividly graphical line maps for many US transit systems, and his highly detailed and well-researched track maps for New York, Boston and Chicago are definitely worth a close look.

Based in the UK, Traincrew Graphic Design offers a small but good selection of replica train carriage maps, as well as some vintage travel poster recreations.

Well known to readers of the blog, Michael Tyznik has some great transit map designs in his Etsy store, including his excellent fantasy/pop-culture mash-ups, a truly wonderful future Chicago map, and a a new series of colorful posters listing all the services at various Japanese rail stations.

NEW! Jake Berman’s FiftyThreeStudio Etsy shop has some great maps, including his ever-expanding “lost subways” series.

NEW! Based out of Melbourne, AdMaps has some great Australia-themed maps, including a series of line maps of Melbourne’s extensive tram network.

Books

The next best thing to transit maps themselves is BOOKS about transit maps. Here’s a selection of some must-reads, many of which are in my personal library. Links provided are affiliate links to Amazon; Transit Maps may receive a small commission from any purchase you might make after following such a link.

Mark Ovenden’s Transit Maps of the World is still the number one reference book for transit map aficionados, and with good reason. Packed to the gills with great maps and diagrams from around the world, it’s easy to get lost in this book for hours.

While you’re at it, check out some of Mark’s other transit and transportation-related books: Railway Maps of the World, Airline Maps (with Maxwell Roberts), and London Underground by Design.

I’m happy to see that the superb Mr. Beck’s Underground Map by the late Ken Garland is still available – the seminal work on the man and his obsession with perfecting “his” diagram. The only book you need on the subject.

Similarly, Vignelli Transit Maps by Peter Lloyd remains the definitive work on this chapter of mapping New York’s extensive transit system, while Paul Shaw’s Helvetica and the New York City Subway System delves deep into the contemporaneous story of typography and design in the system. While somewhat lighter in tone, Subway by John Morris also features material related to maps and design for the subway system.

If you missed the first print run, Boston in Transit – a comprehensive history by Ward Maps’ Steven Beaucher – is currently taking pre-orders for a March 2023 re-release. I ordered this one immediately and can’t wait for it to arrive! Even better, there’s an accompanying print store website – also called Boston in Transit – where you can get prints of many of the maps, posters and pamphlets that are reproduced in the book. Perfect!

Finally, for our New Zealand readers, Can’t Get There From Here: New Zealand Passenger Rail Since 1920 by Andre Brett features maps by Sam van der Weerden, whose work has been featured on Transit Maps previously.

Other Transit Related Gifts and Sites

Last but not least, a round up of other gift ideas that don’t neatly fit into the first two categories!

Chris Arvin’s Transit Supply website has a range of adorable pins, stickers, magnets and more. Definitely the cutest l’il trains you’ll ever see!

Want a real-time LED train tracker map on your desktop? Head over to traintrackr.io and check out their range. Warning: not cheap, but oh-so-geeky!

Official merch for San Francisco’s BART at railgoods.com, including some name plates from decommissioned trains (currently on a waiting list, but more plates are expected to be made available).

Official merch for the MBTA at mbtagifts.com, including a whole bunch of different MBTA maps.

NEW! More official merch! Toronto’s TTC has a great online store, including skateboards with maps on them!

And finally, we can’t forget the store for the wonderful New York Transit Museum!

That’s the list for 2022! Drop me a line if you think we forgot anything, or you’d like your product added. Let’s make this as comprehensive a list as we can!

Submission – Historical Map: Paris Métro + RER Map, c. 1984

October 13, 2022
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Submitted by Hayden, who says:

An interesting map of Paris’ Métro and RER network found in a restaurant in Montreal. The map’s designers seem to have made the most of a limited color palette by assigning the same color to groups of lines that do not intersect–lavender for 2, 8, and 3b, brown for 11 and 6, magenta for 12 and 7, etc. Unfortunately it seems they could not avoid breaking this rule at Strasbourg-St. Denis.

The best I can date this map is to between Dec. 1982 (Line 7 opens a new branch to Le Kremlin – Bicetre) and Feb. 1985 (this branch is extended).

Transit Maps says:

The first thing to note that this diagram – which I believe was designed as a postcard by C. Spandonide (see name at bottom left) – is very old and faded from being on this restaurant’s walls for goodness knows how long. Here’s another copy of it on Flickr that shows what it originally looked like. Note that it’s dated to 1984, which seems about right.

That said, Hayden’s comment about the limited colour palette still holds true. Despite being printed as four-colour process (which allows for almost any tint or shade desired), the Métro routes are shown in only six hues – yellow, red, green, blue, brown and purple. The yellow and blue used for the RER lines are ever-so-slightly different to those used for the Metro lines, but it’s still an interesting design decision. It’s even more interesting when this diagram is compared to a contemporaneous official RATP “Micro” diagram designed by Patrice Rouxel.

Look closely – you can see that there is the exact same breakdown of six colours assigned to the Metro lines on both maps, though some of the colours used are slightly different. So, red on the Spandonide diagram relates to pink on the Rouxel diagram and these colours are both assigned to lines 7 and 12. And so on: green is to light green for lines 4, 7b and 9; blue is to aqua for lines 5 and 13, etc. What we can infer from this is that this is simply how the lines were officially designated at this point in time. The Spandonide map has simply tweaked the hues slightly, perhaps to avoid copyright or licensing issues? The modern pastel route colours that we now know so well simply weren’t in use in 1984.

The unavoidable double-up of green at Strasbourg–St. Denis isn’t too bad as the lines cross at right angles, neatly avoiding any potential confusion. The diagram itself is a valiant effort to fit a complex network into a very small space, even using the black border to contain information about destinations off the edge of the diagram! All things considered, the labels are quite legible – and for once, all-caps is probably a good idea, as lower-case characters could perhaps be too hard to read at such a small point size.

Official Map: Los Angeles Metro Rail & Busway Map, 2022

October 7, 2022
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LA Metro opened the first operating segment of the K Line today, and there’s a new map to go along with it! As we haven’t reviewed this map since 2016 (when the Expo Line extension to Santa Monica opened!), it’s high time for a new look.

The first thing I noticed is how this version of the map seems to be a point-by-point correction of the perceived flaws that I noted in that 2016: the Los Angeles River has been removed from the map, the loop of the A/Blue Line in Long Beach has been restored to a more accurate orientation, and the labels along the B/Red Line are spaced out a bit more evenly, though I think this can still be better – I feel that it can sometimes be better to space labels evenly along a line instead of the station dots. All of these changes are definite improvements, so I’m happy to see them made.

The gradual transition from named lines (Blue/Red/Expo, etc.) to lettered lines – A Line, B Line, E Line, etc.) continues with bullets now at the ends of route lines on the map, but with both names still noted in the legend. By the time the Regional Connector comes on line, I would expect that lettered line names will stand on their own.

The new K Line (note that there’s no secondary name – e.g., the “Pink Line” – for it) slots into the map nicely, with plenty of room for the future stations to be added between Westchester/Veterans and Aviation/LAX stations. I’d personally like to see a thin “bus” line drawn from Aviation/LAX station to the airport to give a better indication of the LAX Shuttle service instead of the fairly indistinct icon that’s currently used.

There are a couple of minor technical errors and inconsistencies: all the labels on the western end of the C Line from Mariposa to Redondo Beach have been pushed downwards slightly so that they no longer align to the same grid as the A and J lines. This is probably intentional to give a bit more room around LAX, but I do like it when elements intentionally line up across a map like this. The label for Crenshaw station sits considerably higher above the C Line than all the other labels.

Very minor pet peeves: Why is 7th St/Metro Center abbreviated to “Metro Ctr” when there’s plenty of room to spell out the name in full? Similarly, the abbreviation of “Arts District” to “Arts Dist”. For me, abbreviations like this on a transit map should be kept to an absolute minimum and used only if there is no other option.

Our final word: A sleek upgrade to what was already one of the better US transit maps. Looking good, LA Metro!

Source: LA Metro website

Official Map: Dopravní společnost Zlín-Otrokovice, Czech Republic, 2022

September 30, 2022
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Submitted by Leo, who says:

Hello! I’m a transportation planning student and longtime fan of your blog, and wanted to submit this map from the twin cities of Zlín and Otrokovice in Moravia in the Czech Republic. The cities have a long history as company towns for the Baťa shoe company and have a very different pattern of urban development than other cities in the region. The region, set in a valley, was planned reflecting modernist principles set by Le Corbusier and Ebenezer Howard, with later additions following the typical socialist-influenced planning used in other modernist housing estates in the former Czechoslovakia. The city’s trolleybus network, which began construction right before WWII, follows the main urban growth axis along the valley, and a local railway line is also integrated into the municipal transport ticketing scheme. The map used is an isometric one which uses coloration based on the tariff zones lines pass through, and line thickness determines the mode that operates on that portion. Let me know your thoughts!

Transit Maps says:

This is a bit of an odd one. While this diagram has been drawn with a lot of skill and precision, I don’t think it’s actually that usable as a piece of wayfinding design. The best example of this genre – an isometric diagram of S- and U-Bahn service in Stuttgart from c. 2000 – works because the whole thing is so simple and clean. All the routes are shown at the same level in the hierarchy and are traceable from one end to the other along their colour-coded lines, leaving no ambiguity at all.

However, this diagram is far more complex and idiosyncratic, and the isometric treatment just adds another barrier to comprehension on top of that. This means everything just takes that little bit longer to understand, and the oft-quoted “eight-second rule” (before a user simply gives up) starts to kick in. A few main problems that I see:

The colour-coding of lines by fare zone seems like a good idea, but it breaks the routes up into disparate segments that look for all the world like they’re totally separate routes that interchange at certain stations along the way. Meanwhile, the grey and white shading behind the diagram has absolutely nothing to do with fare zones, but apparently denotes areas where front door-only boarding is enforced (presumably to stop unscrupulous riders from sneaking on via the back door and not paying a fare?). So right from the start, that’s two major design elements that have completely different meanings to what they usually have on a transit map. While innovation and thinking outside the box are laudable ideals, too much messing with the recognised design language of transit maps can impede usability.

Because each mode – trolleybus and bus – only gets one route line regardless of how many services use each segment, users have to find their desired route number and then hunt for it across the map again and again to follow it to their destination. Changes of direction and branches aren’t shown that intuitively, so it’s hard work, made a bit more difficult by the fact that there’s no differentiation in the way that the route numbers are presented visually – it becomes tricky to know whether you should be following a thick trolleybus line or a thin bus line. Of course, locals might be aware that trolleybuses use route numbers 1 through 14 (the rest being normal buses), but that doesn’t help tourists or other people unfamiliar with the network.

The diagram certainly is visually striking, and I appreciate the attention to detail that’s been put into its creation. Like the Stuttgart diagram, there’s a “3D” building incorporated into the diagram that helps to really sell the dimensional illusion. I also really appreciate the way that there are absolutely no horizontal or vertical route line segments – these always look a bit out of place on these isometric projections. The legend is skillfully incorporated into the map, and the arrows to orient users along the length of the valley is also a nice touch.

Our final word: Really, really pretty – but it seems like a lot of hard work to actually use to get around. Too many conventions get turned on their head.

Source: Dopravní společnost Zlín-Otrokovice website

Official Map: Washington, DC Metrorail with Silver Line, 2022

September 23, 2022
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Thanks to everyone on Twitter alerting me to this new map! While there’s a lot of Washington, DC content on the blog, I haven’t fully reviewed the official WMATA map since 2013, so this revision seems like a good time to look at again.

First off – let’s set it out of our system, everyone… SILVER LINE! SILVER LINE! Finally extending all the way out to Dulles Airport and Ashburn, and surely opening any time now, right? As is usual for WMATA, the map uses the longest name possible for the airport station: “Washington Dulles International Airport” – while the airport’s official name – is an absolute mouthful. Here in Portland, the TriMet MAX map just says “Portland Airport”, not “Portland International Airport” and everyone still knows exactly what they mean.

There’s plenty of other new names apart from those on the Silver Line extension, with five stations getting new names: Downtown Largo (from Largo Town Center), Hyattsville Crossing (Prince George’s Plaza), North Bethesda (White Flint), West Falls Church-VT (removing UVA from the secondary name), and Tysons (Tysons Corner). The future in-fill station at Potomac Yard also makes an appearance with a hollow white dot for its station marker. Apparently, this will be a sticker placed on top of the final version of the map at Metro stations – a clever way to prevent having to replace maps again when the station actually opens.

Once the Silver Line extension opens, the 5A bus service to Dulles Airport will cease, and the map reflects this by removing the connection icons at Rosslyn and L’Enfant Plaza. The B30 to BWI no longer runs, so that’s the end of bus representation on the Metro map.

Stylistically, nothing much has changed now for many years – this is still very recognisably and unmistakably a WMATA map. However, there’s some inconsistencies and room for improvement in places. First off, WMATA really has to work out how they’re going to treat subtitles for station names consistently. We have “Virginia Sq–GMU” and “Ballston–MU” (among others) on one line, but “West Falls Church–VT” and “Potomac Yard–VT” get their secondary names placed in the subtitle. Why? It mainly looks like it’s because the station dots for Virginia Square and Ballston are placed too close together to allow for subtitles, but it just creates inconsistency in the design. Personally, I’d vote for having all of these two- or three-letter abbreviations moved up to the main title, saving the subtitles for the longer station names that need that space saved.

The DC Metro map has always been visually busy, with lots of background colours and detail leading to some poor label placement (look at U Street and other stations on the Yellow/Green line just laid down right on top of the route lines), but that doesn’t mean that new elements need to make things worse. Look at the way that all the new Silver Line station labels overlap the Potomac River, when there’s absolutely no need for them to do so. We don’t need to see the twists and turns of a river on a simplified diagram like this, and it’s not even a particularly accurate interpretation of the geography anyway. If the river just extended straight out from the District border at a 45-degree angle, it would avoid all of the labels completely and dramatically improve legibility.

And one tiny little technical error I spotted: the Fairfax/Arlington county border encroaches into the white keyline where the Silver Line crosses over the Orange Line: all other borders respect such keylines.

Our final word: An obvious evolution of previous versions – there are no surprises here! – that continues and perhaps compounds some previous flaws. But… SILVER LINE! SILVER LINE!

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Source: Jordan Pascale/Twitter

Historical Map: New York Subway IND Division Map by Arthur Weindorf, 1942

September 9, 2022
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Over on Twitter, Peter Lloyd – the doyen of new York Subway experts – has been showcasing the many maps of Arthur Weindorf (1885–1979), a perhaps unsung contributor to the rich transit mapping history of that city. Weindorf was something of an artistic Renaissance Man – he was a cartoonist, fine art painter, and architectural engineer for the New York Public Service Commission. As well as his many drawings and maps of the subway, he created three-dimensional models of the system that were displayed at the 1939–1940 World’s Fair.

Of all the maps that Peter has posted, this hand-drawn preliminary version of an ultimately unpublished IND Division map really caught may eye. It’s simplified, diagrammatic and surprisingly elegant in its execution, with colour-coded lines to bundle like routes together and a clear visual distinction between express (solid lines) and local/shuttle (pecked lines) services.

One oddity of the system as shown is the short-lived Court Street station in Brooklyn, now better known as the home of the New York Transit Museum. Opened in 1936 with plans to be the northern terminus of the HH Fulton Street Local and with possible future extension into Manhattan, it closed just ten years later with service only ever being provided by a one-stop shuttle to the nearby Hoyt-Schermerhorn station.

Despite being drawn two years after the unification of the three divisions of the subway, the map still only shows IND lines, with the few free transfers to the BMT and IRT indicated by large callouts. From 1943, the New York Board of Transportation started using Hagstrom maps that showed the entire network, which might explain why this map was never actually published – the last remnant of the “old way” of depicting the subway.

Still, it’s rather glorious to look at!

Source: Peter Lloyd/Twitter

Official Map: A New Geographical Map for the NJ Transit Rail System, 2022

August 12, 2022
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The NJ Transit rail map has basically looked the same – and has retained most of its faults – since I reviewed it back in the very early days of the blog [November 2011, 1.5 stars], so it came as a surprise when I discovered that that diagram has been replaced with a new geographical map this month. NJ Transit has been down this path before, with similar maps used around 20 years ago, though this design is considerably cleaner than that very muddy execution.

One of the main problems with the previous diagram is that it simultaneously had to show a sprawling statewide network as well as local services like PATH, and the Hudson-Bergen light rail. Obviously, these are at very different levels of scale and detail, and the diagram struggled because of it, unsatisfactorily compressing the considerable detail around Newark/New York into a very small part of the diagram.

The solution chosen here – a statewide geographical map supplemented with local area insets where needed – isn’t groundbreaking, but it is effective and a massive improvement. The cleverest part is the way the bottom third of the map gets rotated 45 degrees counter-clockwise to save massive amounts of space: the Atlantic City Line runs neatly across the bottom of the map instead of having to drop towards the southeast. The map’s border does a lot of good work here, clearly separating the two parts of the map, while making it clear that there’s continuity between the sections at Bordentown.

The diagrammatic insets are neatly drawn with a minimum of fuss, though the colours used for some of the light rail lines could perhaps be better differentiated: it’s a little hard to tell PATH’s grey apart from the dull brown of the Hudson-Bergen light rail, for example. I also like it when the background colours used in an inset are subtly different to those used on the main map, just to help set them above and apart. A leading line or arrow linking the insets to the part of the main map that they’re magnifying would also be handy.

Our final word: One of those rare occasions where a geographical rail map is superior to a diagram. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

Source: NJ Transit website

Submission – Historical Map: Montreal Metro, 1982

August 10, 2022
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Submitted by Hayden, who says:

My apologies for the glare in the photo [No problem! I also straightened the image for publication – Cam]. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this 1982 Montreal Metro map. I found it in a preserved MR-63 subway car at Exporail, a railway museum outside Montreal. The map shows the three Metro lines open at the time with white stations, as well as the under-construction Blue Line and Du Collège extension of the Orange Line.

While the font may not win any awards for legibility, I think it fits beautifully with the map’s design aesthetic. There are a few station names that have changed since 1982 — I find the change from Vincent-d’Indy to the current Édouard-Montpetit particularly interesting. Lastly, I’m sure the makers of this map could never have imagined that the “Métro régional projeté” (given only a small mention in the legend) would be realized before the Blue Line to Anjou.

Transit Maps says:

What a fantastically chunky iteration of the Montreal Metro map! Everything is thick and oversized, and it’s just wonderful. The crowning glory is the use of ITC Bauhaus Black as the typeface throughout: it really shouldn’t work at all, and yet it somehow contrasts against and softens the blockiness of the map to balance it out nicely. Legibility is reduced slightly where the white text crosses the yellow Line 4, but it only affects a few stations.

Other nice touches are the line number bullets at the termini of each line: a square that continues in the direction of the line, but rotates the line number to remain horizontal; and the use of black station dots to denote planned future stations. The fact that Line 5 is only in its planning stage at this point in time helps to explain some of the station name changes: Vincent-d’Indy was an early placeholder name, but the station opened as Édouard-Montpetit in 1988.

Later versions of the map, like this one from 2012, made the waterways more geographical in mature, but I think the level of stylization on this version matches the chunky, diagrammatic nature of the route lines much better. It’s interesting to see how many of the elements that make the Montreal map unique – the black background and the rotated rectilinear form especially – have remained constant, which helps maintain a consistency in design language (crazy display typefaces not withstanding!) over the years.

Our final word: Chunky, bold and with a crazy font choice that somehow works: this is just great, and such a product of its time.

Historical Map: Peninsular Electric Railway, California, c. 1908

August 3, 2022
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An attractive bird’s-eye panoramic map of the lines of the Peninsular Railway (1900–1934), affectionately known as “the Pin” by locals. The railway was founded as a subsidiary of the Southern Pacific Railroad to provide connecting electric interurban service through the Santa Clara Valley from San Jose.

The map itself is a fairly typical example of the genre, though the curved labels for locality names along the lines are an unusual and effective device for enclosing the area relative to the rail line.

Source: PBA Galleries

Submission – Official Map: Santiago Metro, 2022

August 1, 2022
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Submitted by Maximiliano, who says:

It’s been a few years since the last time you checked out what was happening in Santiago de Chile [I last reviewed the official map in 2017 – Cam]. Well, times haven’t been too kind to us down here, but I don’t want to go into details about our current and future “troubles”. They’re too complicated, so anyways…

We have a new map for the Metro de Santiago network. And a good one at that too… [though] it looks suspiciously similar to the unofficial map designed by Laura Sandoval in 2018.

Transit Maps says:

For me, the resemblance of this new official map to Laura’s diagram is only superficial: really only apparent because the official map has become more diagrammatic, losing the busy street grid that used to be such a feature. This is not nearly as schematic as Laura’s diagram, with lots of pseudo-geographical changes in direction still apparent. Though the form of the map has changed, it still uses a lot of the same design language as the 2017 map – note the distinctive terminus station markers – which is nice to see from a continuity point of view.

I do feel that the top part of the map seems a little cramped in comparison with the bottom half… some more care with the vertical spacing of stations from top to bottom using a grid could have helped here.

Very strangely, the map layers the river on top of the lines that cross it. While this is technically correct (the lines run in tunnels under the river), it’s simply not an important or useful piece of information and makes the route lines look disjointed and discontinuous.

Speaking of the river itself, while I appreciate the effort, I don’t think that the wave pattern texture used is particularly effective or aesthetically pleasing. A little more craftsmanship here might have resulted in something a bit better.

Our final word: A shift to a more diagrammatic representation of a growing network results in something that’s perhaps just slightly better than what came before it.

Source: Metro de Santiago website