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.
I’ve been a fan of your website for some time and have dabbled in creating some transit maps of Philadelphia, utilizing many of your tips. The latest is a Vignelli inspired map based on A. Merritt Taylor’s plan for future rapid transit in Philadelphia. The plan is from 1913 and if executed would have left Philadelphia a very different place.
[This 1913 plan was featured on Transit Maps in October 2014 – Cam]
Transit Maps says:
A handsome interpretation of this classic rapid transit plan from Arthur, executed in an equally classic style. The layout looks great, but I feel like the labelling could be a little larger: there’s generally plenty of room. Getting all of the labels just a little further away from the route lines would be good as well. Because of the small labelling, the connecting services icons – which neatly, represent the old Reading, Penn, and B&O railroads – are small and indistinct as well.
I do think that the route designation bullets that Arthur uses at the base of the maps should be integrated into the map itself as well, otherwise they’re not really much use to people unfamiliar with the system. Verbally, the route names are also a bit of a mouthful: “Oh, you need to catch the sixty-nine-bee-el to get to where you’re going” just isn’t as easy as “the five” or “the A”.
On a technical side, there’s a couple of places where I can see little gaps along the route lines when they go around corners: the paths either need to be joined, or – if they’re separate elements sitting on top to cross over other lines – they need to have round end caps applied to disguise the gap (Cam’s sneaky Illustrator tip #253).
Our rating: A fine depiction of a 100-year-old transit plan. Three-and-a-half stars.
Just to show that there’s always a different way to approach the same design problem, here’s a completely different reworked Tube Map by art director/designer, Rich Cousins. Like me, Rich seems to have reached a breaking point where all the additions to the Tube Map over the years have made him say, “there must be a better way!”, although his criteria for a successful redesign are quite different to mine. Note that this map dates back to July of last year, so the new “Zone 2/3″ around Stratford isn’t shown.
In short, Rich has aimed for simplification and reduction, even eschewing the addition of the Thames for orientation. I’ll note here that the last time the official Tube Map got rid of the Thames, the angry mob got out their pitchforks, so I’m not sure this would ever be a popular decision – proceed at your own caution, Rich!
He’s also made the decision to remove TfL Rail and the Emirates Air Line: this is at odds with the way the official Tube Map is evolving, but it’s Rich’s map and he can do what he wants in regards to those “peripheral” services. One thing that the removal of TfL Rail does is to make the shuttle Overground line between Upminster and Romford look even more ridiculous without anything to connect to at the Romford end!
Rich has made some fundamental changes to the methodology of the map that make quite a difference to the way that it looks. First, he butts all lines heading in the same direction as each other right up to each other, regardless of whether they’re in the same real-world tube or tunnel as each other. I don’t mind this too much: it doesn’t change how you use the Tube at all, and it does clean up the District and Piccadilly lines from South Kensington out to Acton Town quite a lot. Similarly, it consolidates the Metropolitan and Jubilee lines quite nicely as they head north out of Baker Street.
A little more problematic is the way Rich has consolidated as many interchange stations as possible into a single dot. It’s a nice idea in theory, but it actually removes a lot of the nuanced information about changing lines that the real map imparts without the reader really being aware of it. For example, Rich has combined Bank and Monument into a single dot. Technically, he’s right: once you’ve passed through any of the fare barriers, you can reach any platform in the complex. But it’s a heck of a walk from one end to the other, which the official map neatly implies with its long “corridor” connector between the two ends. It also makes the stations which Rich has been unable to combine into a single dot stand out like a sore thumb – the long connectors required at Euston, Paddington and Edgware Road being prime examples.
(I’ll also note here the error at Paddington: the Bakerloo line needs to come down to the District/Circle line platforms at Praed Street, not the Hammersmith & City/Circle line platforms at the opposite end of the complex.)
The single dot is also applied a little inconsistently: the separate stations at Walthamstow Central and Walthamstow Queens Road get a single dot, while Clapham High Street and Clapham North get separated out into two distinct stations. Both are shown as interchanges on the official map.
Relative spatiality is an area where I think Rich’s map falls down. His argument seems to be that elements that don’t directly interface with each other can be shown in the wrong place if it enhances clarity. I respectfully disagree, as I think that maintaining the correct relative position of stations and lines helps to reinforce how the network relates to the city around it. There are lots of examples of what I consider “poor” placement on the map, including West Ruislip, South Tottenham, Mill Hill East to the east of the main branch, and the absurd routing of the Overground right through the middle of the Hainault Loop.
I absolutely adore Rich’s Northern line – dead straight from Morden all the way up to Edgware – but the poor old Victoria line has to take a terribly convoluted path from Warren Street up to Euston and back down again to hit Kings Cross St. Pancras – a victim of the single dot policy, I’m afraid. I also admire his attempt to do something visually different with the fare zones by smoothing them out, but I think they could still use some further refinement to get the shapes just right.
Almost inexcusably, Rich’s map doesn’t present any accessibility information, although he says he’s working on a solution. Again, his single dot solution is harming the map here, as the multiple dots of the official map are used to show accessibility information for separate sets of platforms at large interchange stations. For example, the DLR at Bank/Monument is fully accessible, but none of the other platforms are.
Station names in colours that match their line is something that I’ve never particularly cared for: the different chromatic values make some names more visually prominent than others, when they should all be equally important in the information hierarchy. The explosion of Overground lines also means there’s a lot of orange labels on the map – like the map needs more orange! Still, it’s interesting to see the technique applied to a complex map like this (I think Chicago’s “L” map used to do this as well).
I hope no-one thinks that I hate this map after this long and detailed review, because I don’t. It’s a well-considered and nicely drawn alternative Tube Map, with a lot of thought-provoking additions and alterations. Like me with many of my redrawn maps, I suspect he’s put in a lot of these changes to purposefully make his map as different as possible to the official one – because who wants to look at the things that have already been done?
One more post about my redrawn London Tube Map before I move onto other projects.
One thing that bothered me about the map as I worked on it was the way that no visual distinction is made between interchanges that are made within the fare control area – that is, simply moving from one platform to another – and those that require you to exit one station and re-enter at another nearby station, preferably by tapping out and then back in again with an Oyster card. There are many such interchanges in London, some of which are well-known and others which seem to be a deep, dark secret known only to the most seasoned of commuters. They’re officially known as Out-of-Station Interchanges, or OSIs, and they even have time limits defined to set boundaries for “reasonable” interchanges between stations.
It seemed to me that the distinction between a normal interchange and an OSI is fairly important, so I set out to see if there was an easy way to distinguish between them on the map. In the end, I came up with what I think is an elegantly simple solution: retain the white “corridor” connector for normal interchanges, but use a thinner black-only connecting line for OSIs. The white connector visually joins all the interchange dots at a station as a unified whole, while the black connector separates them, immediately implying a more complex journey.
Above is a great example of how the new connector works. The Underground and Overground platforms at Walthamstow Central are connected by a normal interchange symbol, while the short walk to the nearby Walthamstow Queen’s Road station is indicated with a black OSI connector. Another OSI connector can also be seen at the Seven Sisters/South Tottenham interchange. Hackney Downs and Hackney Central were recently linked by a footbridge inside the fare control area, so they’ve been upgraded to a “true” interchange symbol.
Showing out-of-station interchanges consistently and properly did require one fairly major reconfiguration of route lines at Paddington. Here, I’ve brought the Bakerloo line down to join with the District and Circle lines at the Praed Street section of the complex. The short walk through the National Rail station to reach the Hammersmith & City/Circle line platforms is now neatly indicated with an OSI connector.
The Bakerloo flips back up to the north again after Paddington to place Edgware Road in the correct position relative to the other Edgware Road. While this pair of stations could technically have been shown as an OSI, I’ve chosen not to: it’s not a very convenient or useful place to change with Paddington and Baker Street nearby, so the map rightfully discourages their use as an interchange. Note also the OSIs at White City/Wood Lane and Shepherd’s Bush.
Not shown, but also useful: an OSI connector between the two Hammersmith stations. Have a look at the big image of the map to see all the OSIs that I’ve identified, and let me know if you think I’ve missed any.
While you’re there, have a look at the potential future additions to the Tube Map that I’ve added just to give you something else to look at: the Metropolitan line extension to Watford Junction, the Bakerloo line extension to Hayes via Old Kent Road (which may or may not ever get past Lewisham) and the Battersea Power Station extension of the Northern line, which is nicely lined up in case it gets extended further to Clapham Junction. Yes, I’m very aware that any future Tube Map will also have to deal with all the new Overground and Crossrail 2 lines, but that’s beyond the scope of this project (at the moment).
As you can see, he’s carried across the New York style of showing all the service patterns on the map. In New York, this is used to distinguish between local and express services, while in London, it reveals the secret inner workings of the lines that the Tube Map never really gets around to showing. For example, Metropolitan line services out to Rickmansworth and beyond don’t stop between Harrow-on-the-Hill and Moor Park.
It’s just a fact of life in London: service patterns are indicated on the platform with signs and announcements, rather than on the map. I well remember standing on the westbound District Line platforms at Earl’s Court back in 2003, watching for the arrow on the indicator board to point towards Wimbledon so I could get back to where I was staying in London at the time.
Unfortunately, if you took the Tube Map’s design principles – show the line, but not the service patterns – and applied it to New York, you’d come up with a map that everyone would decry as useless because it doesn’t show express versus local. This is probably why such a map doesn’t seem to exist.
I guess you could add extra route lines to get around this problem, but then it wouldn’t truly be in the style of the Tube Map, would it?
Edit: You can buy prints of my attempt at such a map here.
Inspired by this schematic map of the Sydney Suburban Network from 1969 (June 2012, 2 stars), I decided to create a retro-looking map of the rail network in 1950 in a similar style.
Transit Maps says:
I think you’ve nailed the look and feel of this piece quite well, although – like me with my digital recreation of a 1939 map of the Sydney network – you’ve discovered that modern computer-designed artwork can look way too clean to pass for something made over half a century ago, despite the weathered paper texture you’ve added.
The system still looks very recognisable – there’s a few more branch lines than today and the City Circle is still incomplete – but this map shows the majority of the Sydney Trains network we still use today.
