Thanks to everyone (and I do mean everyone!) who has sent the recent “The World’s Most Complex Subway Maps as Determined by Scientists!” article to me – from various sources, including this take from CityLab.
However, when I read the full academic paper that all these articles are based on, I think that everyone’s got the wrong end of the stick. The study is not of map complexity at all, but of network complexity.
The methodology outlined at the end of the paper makes it very clear that a theoretical topological network has been assembled for each city based on information from Wikipedia and data feeds from the relevant transit agencies, with travel and transfer times accounted for within each model. These models are then tested mathematically – entirely with equations – to determine the complexity level of each system.
At no point is an real official printed map used, nor are there any usability tests performed by real humans. It seems to me that the actual design of a map – which can make a simple network incomprehensible or a complex one easy to navigate – is not considered at all in this study. So while the study is interesting, and reveals a lot about the maximum amount of information that a human can reasonably hope to remember (the start point, two interchange points and the end point, basically), it really doesn’t say anything about how map design can help or hinder that process.
In other words: According to the study, New York has the most complex transit network in the world, but not necessarily the most complex map.
Sidenote: If you’d like to read a proper usability test paper for transit maps, check out this one that Max Roberts did for the Paris Métro, comparing “standard” octolinear maps to his curvilinear version. [PDF]
Paris’ other underground transportation system. This is a fantastic and detailed map of the once-extensive network of pneumatic tubes used for whisking messages, post and telegrams from one side of the city to the other. Established in 1866, the system remained in use until 1984, when it was finally supplanted by “modern” technology like fax and telex machines. At the system’s apogee, there were over 460 kilometres (285 miles) of tubes running beneath the city.
Notable on this map are a few hand-drawn additions and deletions, suggesting that this map actually represents the system a few years after its nominal date of 1967. A small inset at the bottom right shows the (presumably separate and secure) governmental pneumatic tube network.
I came across this horrendous mess of lines and angles. Its the Weekday Service map for Belgian Rail – the national rail company for Belgium. Sorry its only in French/Dutch, but I think the drawing speaks for itself. I know making a map for a whole country is no easy feat but I feel like there must be some improvements to be made, especially around Brussels.
Transit Maps says:
Yep, that’s pretty awful, alright. The chaotic tangle of thin lines in and around Brussels is almost impossible to decipher, with lines criss-crossing at all angles without any attempt to layer or order them effectively. The insipid labelling doesn’t help either – local trains get a green number slapped on top of a green route line, with a low-contrast drop shadow between them – and the massive, sprawling map legend is pretty unattractive as well.
About the only thing I really like from this map is the “wide” station dot used to show where a single route number bifurcates (or joins together, depending on direction of travel). See route 4 at Kortijk, which splits to go to either Poperinge or Lille, France.
Our rating: Cheap and nasty; almost impossible to use in the area around Brussels. One star.
Here’s a gem of an old map, sent my way by long-time follower, Mike Christensen. It’s an overview map of the UTA bus system in Salt Lake City from 1979, done in that cheerful cartoony illustration style that was so beloved at the time. I especially like how there’s a slight perspective to the whole map, as if we were looking towards Salt Lake City from an elevated viewpoint far to the south. I’m also loving that oh-so-1970s-American-style UTA logo: red, white and blue with added Helvetica goodness. It’s like they saw the (original) Amtrak logo and said, “We’ll have one of those, please!”
The reverse side would seem to have more detailed/accurate insets for important parts of the map, based on the caption at left and the slight paper show-through.
I’d definitely love to see a high-res version of this map to savour the details!
Canberra’s CapitalMetro light rail project will (apparently) commence construction this year. The community is still fairly divided over whether it’s a good idea – I wonder if a more appealing transit map would increase support?
Transit Maps says:
It’s not exactly exciting, is it? But that’s always a problem with a single-line light rail project: just exactly how do you make it look more impressive? I’ll give this one a pass for now as it’s obviously more of a planning/corridor map – complete with 750-metre-diameter walking distance circles – than a real transit map. Basically, it’s designed to introduce people to the project and its general trajectory, rather than act as a navigational tool. Hence the emphasis on the names of Northbourne Avenue and Flemington Road, as well as the calling out of the City, Dickson and Gungahlin as major destinations along the route.
One interesting thing about the map is the choices it makes for the stop names along the way. Street names often change when they hit Northbourne Avenue, so there’s a choice between two names for the map. Here’s what they chose, compared to the other option:
Elouera Street (east of Northbourne) over Gould Street
Condamine Street (west of Northbourne) over Ipima Street
Macarthur Avenue (west of Northbourne) over Wakefield Avenue
As they’ve chosen names from either side of Northbourne, I’d say that the decisions are very deliberate, picking the more evocative name each time. All part of the psychology of gaining acceptance for the project!
Our rating: A perfectly average planning map. Hoping for something more exciting upon the project’s completion! 2.5 stars.
Source: CapitalMetro project page – link no longer active
Hello, I know this is an odd question but I figured that if anyone would know this, you would: So I was browsing a map of Paris’s Transilien railway services when I spotted an oddity: A terminal station directly below Gare Montparnasse: Paris Vaugirard. I look all over the Internet but no trace of any Paris Vaugirard station can be found. Do you know what is going on here?
Transit Maps says:
It totally exists, Lucas, although it took me a while to track it down!
It’s also known as Montparnasse III, and it’s a glorified side entrance to the main Gare de Montparnasse complex as well as housing platforms 25-28 separately to the others (1 to 24 are in the main station). Here’s a Google Street View image of its rather unprepossessing entrance on the Rue du Contenin: the main station is behind us to the left.
And here’s a PDF showing how it all fits together: Vaugirard is “Hall 3″ on this map. French Wikipedia says it’s mainly used for long-distance trains coming from Granville or Argentan, but I guess that some Transilien services can call here on occasion, hence its inclusion on the map.
Mystery solved!
Now, onto the map, which once again proves that zone/tariff maps are the ugly step-sister in the transit map world.
Seriously, this is easily the worst of the many Ile-de-France maps, with possibly the worst attempt at concentric zones I’ve ever seen, wobbling unconvincingly around all over the place to “join the dots” between stations. The green bands clash with a lot of the route line colours, and they’re especially horrid when combined with the magenta terminal station labels (Why?!).
The route lines aren’t much better, as they adhere to standard 45-degree angles until it all just gets too difficult for the designer: then they go off in any direction that they please – curves, wiggles and kinks in the line! They’re also pretty sloppily drawn, with lots of examples of parallel routes going out of alignment as they round a curve together.
The less said about the awful, messy station labelling the better, and the blobby interchange symbols that branch out in so many random direction are no more worthy of discussion!
Our rating: Almost embarrassingly bad, especially when it’s presented on the same web page as the superb Paris Region transit map (January 2014, 4.5 stars), which would work for calculating zones just as well – if not much better – than this visual atrocity. Half-a-star and into the Transit MapsHall of Shame for representing Paris so poorly!
Submitted by long-time correspondent, Kara, who says:
Here’s a project I’ve been working on for a while now—quite possibly one of the most difficult maps I’ve ever made. You and I hold similar opinions of Chicago’s RTA system map, namely, that it’s decent, but it could be better. So I’ve been working on optimizing a unified map of Chicago’s urban rail, showing the CTA and the inner regions of the Metra. My goal was to prioritize the CTA routes while still making the Metra routes usable. I think my favorite feature is the black arrows in the loop—I love how those turned out—and I think my least favorite feature is how crowded the labels get around Jefferson Park. I also still wish I could find a way to bring the western parts of the Green and Blue lines closer together. Overall, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, but I’d love to know what you have to think about it!
Transit Maps says:
This looks pretty good, Kara, and is a strong indicator of growing confidence in your map-making skills. Keep it up! The map utilises the same technique as the Boston MBTA rapid transit map in that it shows commuter rail within the urban core, but uses destination arrows to point towards far-off terminus stations. This allows for a more even scale throughout the map, which works quite nicely here.
I do think that the northern part of the map seems a little more crowded and tightly spaced than the southern half: maybe a bit of judicious respacing of stations could even things out a bit. I’m especially looking at how tight the stations along the northern Red and Purple lines are compared to the Red and Green lines to the south of the city. As Kara mentions, the triangle of lines around Jefferson Park also creates some spacing problems, but I think some minor tweaks can fix a lot of that – nudge the Brown Line up a bit higher, flip some labels to the other side of their route line, and so on. The too-far-apart western Blue and Green lines are an unfortunate byproduct of the expanded Loop area: the official map’s Loop inset mitigates this problem.
Some other minor thoughts: I think that there could be a small space between the northbound and southbound lines at Union station, just to emphasise that no services are through-running. I also think that the treatment of all the LaSalle stations overcomplicates things: it would better reflect reality if it went Loop LaSalle, Blue Line LaSalle and then the Metra LaSalle Street station. Its passenger entrance lies to the south of Congress Parkway, which the Blue Line station sits beneath. Blue Line LaSalle should also sit slightly to the right of the other stations, not the left. I also wonder whether the double-headed directional arrow on the Green Line through the Loop is truly necessary, as bi-directional travel along a route line is always assumed unless shown otherwise on a transit map. Finally, Kara’s forgotten to italicise three Metra station names – Rosemont, Schiller Park and Franklin Park–Belmont Ave.
Now onto the big issue, and one that’s sure to raise the ire of true-born Chicagoans: the non-adherence of Kara’s stations to the city’s well known and incredibly regular street grid. To take but one example: there are four Pulaski stations on the CTA: on the Green, Blue, Pink and Orange lines. These are all located on the same arrow-straight, north-south running thoroughfare, the eponymous Pulaski Road. Hence, they should all line up in one neat column, but on Kara’s map, they’re not aligned at all. It’s the same for all the Kedzies, Ciceros, etc. Obviously, this is a stylistic decision that Kara has made, and it ultimately doesn’t affect navigation as the lines don’t interact with each other, but it also doesn’t fit with how Chicagoans perceive their city – and that can be a very important element for a map to consider.
Our rating: Definitely illustrates Kara’s growing confidence in map-making, but could use some tweaks and rethinking to really make it shine. Three stars.
Thanks again so much for your feedback and review of my Connecticut map (April 2015). I’ve been working on a few new maps, and I’ve finally gotten one in a place where I’d love to have your feedback. I don’t know if you’ve seen the West Wing, but there’s an episode where some characters have a meeting with the made-up Cartographers for Social Equality. The thrust of their argument is that maps change the way we see the world, and that’s undeniably true.
With that as inspiration, I’ve been trying to think – short of investing literal billions of dollars to fix the system, what could we do to fix DC’s transit systems? The cheapest result I came up with is this map. Would a map fix anything? Obviously not. But some of the biggest issues we have in this city are that too many residents work under the assumption that Metro is the be all, end all. Our streetcar has been developed poorly, but it’s been frustrating hearing people say we don’t need the streetcar because we have the Metro (even though it right now serves neighborhoods completely unserved by Metro). The sad part is that Metro is incredibly successful…as a commuter rail system. It’s great at getting people in and out of the district! Would district residents maybe be more willing to invest in better intracity transit if we stopped pretending that Metro should be an effective way to get around the city? Maybe!
Getting Metro to mesh well with VRE and MARC systems was simultaneously easier and more complex than I was expecting. It’s obviously hard to find a good color scheme for 11 lines is not what I would call easy. And then there was the question of scale. I think this schematic for metro is more geographically accurate than the existing metro map, but I found myself extending lines just as often as I was truncating them. This was intensely frustrating, but I tried to remind myself that this needed to be effective as a schematic, demonstrating relative distances even if they lacked precision.
I’d love to have your feedback, both on the execution and the theory behind the concept.
Transit Maps says:
This is an undeniably simple idea – treating Metro, VRE and MARC as one integrated commuter rail system serving the Greater DC area – even if regional politics would almost certainly preclude it from ever actually happening. (As well as the whole issue of timetabling, with Metro running frequent service all day, and MARC and VRE really only running rush hour commuter services… let’s just assume that in Nick’s fantasy world, all those pesky details are ironed out when the three agencies merge.)
I do agree that Metro can seem more akin to commuter rail than urban rapid transit: it brings people from the suburbs to and from the central employment areas perhaps more effectively than moving them from place to place within the District – compare the web-like structure of Paris’ Métro to the hub-and-spoke nature of DC’s namesake and you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about. So, Nick’s map – though implausible – does offer an interesting alternative perspective on transit in the Greater DC area.
The map itself is quite nicely drawn, with some obvious Vignellian influence. The newly-minted names for each route give good local flavour, but do present a bit of a problem for colour-blind users, as they’re the only way to identify which line is which. Unfortunately, some of the line colours (especially Manassas, Montgomery and Prince George’s) can look very similar for these readers. The official Metro map’s lettered bullets (”BL, “RL”, etc.) at the end of each line help alleviate this problem; maybe Nick could consider something similar.
The large area that the map covers – and the hub-and-spoke nature of the network that I mentioned previously – means that there’s a lot of empty space around the edge of the map. Although Nick is keen to emphasise the relative distances covered by the system, I do think he could tighten the map up a bit and also make the labels for the stations just a bit bigger. Everything just feels a little distant and small at the moment.
Minor tweaks: the Green/Prince George’s line should cross over the pink/brown lines, as it’s getting lost underneath them at present, especially with the change in direction being hidden. I’d also nudge the angled Blue/Arlington corner down next to Courthouse until it lines up with the 90-degree corner of the Silver/Dulles line, just to be a little neater. One typo: it should be Arlington Cemetery, not Cemetary.
I’m not sure how I feel about all the county boundaries: it just seems so parochial, as well as cluttering up the map with a whole heap of dashed lines, especially when it gets to outlying counties that don’t even have rail service. Then again, it does help with rapid orientation for users. Finally, I’m always sad when the “District diamond” doesn’t make a perfectly symmetrical shape: Nick’s left side is just a little lower than his right.
Our rating: An interesting – and perhaps a little sardonic – reimagining of rail transit in the Greater DC area. I like the thought put into the concept, and the map’s not bad either. Some tweaking could perhaps tighten the layout up some more and really make it sing. 3 stars.
Taken from a rather breathless prospectus promoting the Avenue of the Americas (also known as plain old Sixth Avenue, New York) as the economic and cultural epicentre of pretty much the entire universe.
Produced by the Avenue of the Americas Association, and entitled simply “From humble beginnings to architectural and commercial greatness – the saga of the Avenue of the Americas: New York’s prestige address and one of the great thoroughfares of the world”, the brochure waxes lyrical about the history, present and future of this grand old street. Its pages do offer an interesting look at both the construction and demolition of the original elevated rail line, but it’s this subway map on the inside back cover that caught my eye.
Unfortunately printed in dark brown and black on yellow card stock (soooo 1970s!), it can be a little hard to distinguish between roads and subway lines, especially because the map makes the Avenue of the Americas (naturally!) three times as wide as all the other streets. But this is a map designed to reinforce how awesome the street is – gaze upon our centrally located subway stops and how they conveniently connect you with the rest of New York! – rather than acting as a truly useful map. They even sneakily rename the IND Sixth Avenue line as the “Ave. of Americas Line”!
Points of interest: the northern terminal of the Sixth Avenue line is at 57th Street: the IND 63rd Street line hasn’t been built yet and is shown as a “Future extension to Queens”. There’s also a dashed line for a “Proposed Crosstown Shuttle” on 48th Street, part of the 1968 “Program for Action” that never came to fruition.
A sightseer’s travel map of Japan showing famous landmarks, mountains, seaside resorts and hot springs
1936 Japan National Railroad (JNR) map of the Japanese Empire including Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria produced under the supervision of Prof. Sho Takahashi of the National Railroad Bureau.
Suffice to say, it contains many amusing advertisements, including the one on the front cover which is for… some kind of hormone supplement lotion?
This. Is. So. Beautiful. Such amazing detail and crisp printing, especially for the time period.