Check out the Marin County transit maps on page 110 of this thesis (source below). They’re so distinct! Maybe you’ve seen them but I couldn’t NOT send you these. Vignelli much?
Transit Maps says:
I haven’t seen these before, Denis – and you’re right: they’re absolutely fantastic. I feel that the mid- to late-1970s was a time when America actually embraced clean, modernist “European” design, especially on the West Coast. So, while I can see some Vignellian influences – “one dot, one stop” especially – I think these maps are also very much a product of the time and place they were created. I doubt that Vignelli would have appreciated the use of non-standard angles or the literal pictorial depictions of the ferries to San Francisco.
Of the two maps, I think the South Marin one is more effective: a brighter colour palette and a logical order to the diagram makes it a little better, in my opinion. The Larkspur map gets a little too clever with the “roundabout” device used to represent urban areas, and the Route 29 Canal line seems unnecessarily convoluted and cramped for space. I do like the representation of the Larkspur Ferry Terminal’s iconic triangular space frame roof, which was then only a year old.
Our rating: Lovely little diagrammatic maps, very evocative of the time and place they were made. Four stars!
As special educator, I work with a 7 year old boy who has memorised the complete Berlin S-/U-Bahn, bus and tram network. Every day, he draws exactly one section of the network (without any mistakes, of course) and gives it to me as a present. Last month I started to puzzle all the parts together into one big map on the wall of my office. The common project is not finished yet, but I encouraged him to pay more attention to the west part of Berlin 😉
I am impressed; I am very, very impressed. I’d definitely love to see this again when it’s finished!
While I was researching my redrawn Tube Map, I stumbled across the above representation of the Underground as it supposedly appears to a wheelchair user. While it’s probably meant to be more metaphorical of the fractured nature of the network than a literal representation, I find myself infuriated by it. For example, the “map” really makes it appear that if you get on at Kings Cross St. Pancras (possibly the one truly accessible station on the Underground), you simply cannot go anywhere.
There have been other maps that show the same thing more accurately, but the newest one I can find is from 2011. A lot has changed on the Tube Map since then, including adding the distinction between street-to-platform and street-to-train accessibility to the map. Seeing as I had the Tube Map to hand for my previous project, I quickly modified it to show these two different networks. Unlike previous efforts, I also modified the route lines to reflect new end points for lines: if there were no accessible stations between a certain station and the end of the line, I deleted that section of track. As a result, the maps more accurately show the extent of accessible services.
Step-free access from street to platform or better
Use the slider to show the full Underground network compared to the street-to-platform network.
This map shows stations with both of the accessibility icons from the Tube Map. If a station has some accessible platforms and some inaccessible, the inaccessible connections have been deleted. This leads to situations like the Bank and Tower Gateway DLR stations being accessible, but not connected to their respective Tube stations, or the Romford–Upminster Overground shuttle line cutting off at Emerson Park because the Overground platforms at Upminster aren’t accessible.
The only complete casualty is the Waterloo and City line: neither of its two stations are accessible. The Bakerloo line now only serves three stations between Harrow & Wealdstone and Willesden Junction, and most other lines are truncated in some form or another. The Overground continues to be a viable network, although it still loses a lot of stations.
The other main point of interest is the lack of accessible interchanges within the central “thermos flask” – Kings Cross St. Pancras, Green Park and Westminster are it. You can’t change from the Underground to the Overground/National Rail at Liverpool Street or Euston. Baker Street and Bank/Monument don’t exist. This is the biggest impediment to real accessibility on the Underground – the inability to transfer easily between lines in the most important part of the network.
Note that Greenford (the new western terminus of the Central line) is the only street-to-train accessible station on that line: this leads to a very odd situation in the (frankly horrifying) next map…
Street to Train Access Only
Use the slider to show the full Underground network compared to the street-to-train network.
Here’s the Underground network for those people who truly need step-free access from the street outside the station all the way onto the train. This means there’s no gap or height difference between the edge of the platform and the door of the train. It’s a pretty exacting standard, and the percentage of people who truly need this level of service is probably pretty low – but the map certainly doesn’t make for pretty viewing. The Waterloo and City, Bakerloo, Central and District lines have been wiped from the map entirely. The Circle and Hammersmith and City lines now just shuttle people between Hammersmith and Kings Cross St. Pancras, while the entire Overground has been reduced to a short section between Dalston Junction and Canada Water.
Only the DLR and the Emirates Air Line escape entirely unscathed. The Jubilee Line retains good accessibility in its modern eastern section, but the section that it inherited from the Bakerloo line has just one fully accessible station at Kingsbury. The Piccadilly and Northern Lines retain much of their length, but very few stations. Interchanges in central London are at Kings Cross St. Pancras and Green Park –that’s it.
Remember Greenford? Well, it may be fully accessible, but it no longer connects to a single other similar station. So it’s sitting out there all by itself with no possible route to the rest of the map: a Central line station with no Central line.
To close, I’ll note that TfL actually offers a lot of information for travellers who need accessibility information, including this insanely comprehensive step-free guide (PDF link) and more on the accessibility section of their website.
Wow! I’ve been completely blown away by the (mostly positive) response to my redrawn Tube Map. Thanks to everyone who has left me a comment or note – all of your thoughts help to inform future revisions to the map. There’s a few more parts of the map that I’m personally really happy with that I’d like to highlight in a little more detail than the already lengthy initial post allowed. Read on for the details!
The grid
As I mentioned in my initial post, the Tube Map is built up using the width of the route line, expressed as “x”. So it makes perfect sense to use an underlying grid that’s equal to “x” as the basis of the map. Except that the official map doesn’t really adhere to that grid very well. I started building my version of the map from Earl’s Court, so the zero coordinates for my grid are at the centre of the District line station marker. As can be seen, route lines and station markers are all aligned to the grid: there’s always an exact multiple of “x” between elements. The same can’t be said for the official map (top). With the zero coordinates set to the same location, it can be seen that other elements don’t consistently align with the grid. It’s perhaps a minor thing that doesn’t make a huge difference to the final look of the map, but knowing that station markers should never be closer than 5x together is a good thing to know when laying out new sections. It’s also easier to rapidly step-and-repeat station labels and markers when they lock properly to a grid. The grid gives internal logic to the map as the designer works, even though it’s invisible in the final product.
Also noticeable is that the labels for Earl’s Court and South Kensington have been pushed lower than all the other labels to accommodate the circular interchange symbols. I believe this actually goes against TfL’s own design guidelines, which specify a set distance for labels from the edge of the route line, not the station marker. Lining all the labels up horizontally along the route lines – without some bumping lower or higher – looks smoother and makes them easier to follow.
Alignment of Interchange Markers
This is a small change that I really think has a big impact to the overall look of the map. On the official map, diagonal interchange markers often drop down lower than vertical ones (or further across for horizontal ones). I tightened them up across the map so that the edges aligned consistently, no matter what the orientation of the interchange. So much neater!
Neat Non-Interchange Crossovers
There are two places on the map where the addition of Crossrail could have added some very unsightly and unnecessarily complicated-looking intersections, with three routes all crossing (but not interacting with each other) in very close proximity. In both cases, I was thrilled to be able to get everything to line up so that the route lines all crossed each other neatly at one spot. Solving potential headaches like this in a consistent and elegant manner like this really makes me happy.
The Western End of The Central, Piccadilly and Metropolitan Lines
Without a doubt, my favourite reworked piece of the map. Restoring the straight line of the Metropolitan from Preston Road all the way out to Uxbridge (last seen in the 1986 edition of the official Tube Map) required careful thought and a lot of trial and error, but it was totally worth it. Not only does it remove the nonsensical northwestern alignment of the concurrent Metropolitan and Piccadilly lines between Rayners Lane and Ruislip, but it also successfully reduces the vast amount of space between stations on the Central and Piccadilly lines as they head northwards. You can clearly see on the official map how the zone boundaries force the stations on the Piccadilly line into unnatural positions – Alperton has to be brought a long way up the line to squeeze into Zone 4, creating a huge gap between it and Park Royal. Gaps like this break the rhythm of the map, and I’ve tried to avoid them as much as possible. I will admit that my task is made easier because I’ve chosen not to show Zones – which has been a bone of contention for some commenters.
Accessibility Icon Option
Finally, addressing another controversial design choice, my use of non-literal, non-standard icons to indicate accessibility. While some praised it as elegant and simple, others pointed out that the wheelchair icon is universally understood, even by those who don’t speak English. The Tube Map does require people to refer to the map’s legend to differentiate between the two different versions of the icon, but at least the wheelchair gives some contextual clues. So here’s a “hybrid” version of the map that I’m working on that uses wheelchair icons within interchange circles without covering them completely. However, icons for non-interchange stations are still placed with each station’s label instead of replacing the station’s “tick” with a big round blob. I’ve redrawn the icon to work better at the slightly smaller size, and flipped it to face right instead of left. This works better with our left-to -right reading order, and also implies forward motion. Overall, I think it’s a good compromise, if not quite as elegant and clean as my original concept.
Design note: I did the smart thing and set the accessibility icons up as Symbols in Adobe Illustrator, so that changing them from one design to the other literally took a few clicks of the mouse.
As always, let me know what you think in the comments or via Twitter!
In case it wasn’t already clear, our Props Dept. is incredible. Here is a close up of Roan’s map of tunnels and hideouts – an old subway map.
Look closely, you can find clues to the greater world…
A “near future” combined DC/Baltimore rail transit map from the TV series “The 100″. Looks like the Wyman design of the DC map won the day when WMATA and the MTA merged. A fun prop indeed – and one that has r/The100 on Reddit talking – but seriously: what transit map doesn’t label any stations at all?
What happens when I completely redraw London’s Tube Map in the style of the Tube Map? Not an alternative map, but a rigorous reconstruction of the real thing to bring it back in line with its diagrammatic roots.
London’s Underground Diagram (or “Tube Map”) has long been regarded as an icon of informational design, pioneering the way for just about every other schematic transportation map in the world since its inception way back in 1931. But how much of that reputation is actually deserved these days?
Note: the design of the Tube Map is the intellectual property of Transport for London. This redrawing has been executed as an educational and instructive design exercise only – a design and technical critique of the current map that also offers some ideas for future improvement. It is not available for sale or for licensing. The large preview of the map is heavily watermarked to make this situation clear to all viewers.
The Underground network has grown in both size and complexity in the decades since the Tube Map’s debut, and H.C. Beck’s ingenious design has been asked to convey more and more information with each passing year: more Underground lines than he probably ever envisioned, the addition of the Overground and DLR, fare zone shading (an early version of which he absolutely loathed), accessibility icons and more. Personally, I believe that the map – in its current format – is ill-equipped to handle future additions, especially with the just-announced decision to gradually transfer all Greater London commuter rail services to TfL’s control under the Overground brand.
A number of designers have proposed alternative London rail maps that deal with this problem – like this lovely diagram by the very talented Jug Cerovic – but I started to wonder: what if the Tube Map was just drawn better?
There’s no doubt in my mind that the current iteration of the Tube Map is a diagram that’s almost completely forgotten that it is one. There’s very little rhythm, balance or flow to the composition of the map outside the central “thermos flask”, and there’s shockingly little use of a underlying unifying grid. As a result, nothing really aligns properly with anything else anymore.
Much of the blame for this belongs to the hideous alternating-stripes fare zones, which have to go around every element that belongs to a station. If there’s a long station name, the zone has to enclose it completely, which can push the station marker out of harmonious spacing with the other stations on the line (see the Piccadilly line out to Heathrow), or force station names to suddenly swap to the opposite side of the route line (hello, southern end of the Northern line!). The more I look at the map, the more it’s obvious that the zones are making the routes and stations subsidiary to them, not the other way around.
So – first things first: the zones have to go. They’ve only been on the Tube Map since 2002, so it’s not a huge loss. TfL could offer an extra map that contains this information if people need it (like many European transit agencies do), but I kind of get the feeling that tap-on, tap-off Oyster cards mitigate the need for most travellers to know which zones they’re passing through.
Next, the accessibility icons, which are a design problem for a few reasons. Their use of a large circular station marker – regardless of whether or not they’re an interchange station – adds visual confusion and clutter to the map, and impedes the reading flow of route lines. The DLR is a web of blue blobs (which is fantastic for accessibility needs) and becomes very visually heavy in comparison to the rest of the map. See how much nicer it looks below with ticks for stations!
I wanted to find a way to reserve the circular station shape to only indicate interchanges (its original purpose), which meant I had to come up with a different way to show accessible stations. Because London unusually shows two types of accessible stations – street to platform, and street to train – a reader has to first refer to the map’s legend to determine which icon is which. Using this to my advantage, I devised simple circular blue dots – hollow for street to platform, and solid for street to train – that could either be placed inside an interchange station’s circle, or next to a standard station’s name along with National Rail, water services and other informational icons. The idea for placing a small circle inside an interchange circle had its roots in the Tube Map itself, which used a small black dot inside an interchange to indicate connections to British Rail in the 1964 Paul Garbutt-designed version of the map. Design-wise, I think that it’s an unobtrusive and attractive solution, although it’s probably illegal under some Disabilities Act or another to not use a wheelchair icon to indicate accessibility. This design solution also had the added bonus of restoring most of the lovely and distinctive terminus station “bars” to the map — blobs having replaced all but three of them (Watford, Mill Hill East and Cockfosters) on the official map.
Above, you can see my blue icons set inside an interchange symbol (right) in a diagram that illustrates the other major problem with the accessibility blobs: they force route lines further apart than they should be. In their natural state, double-interchange symbols actually overlap each other by the width of their black outline, which is half the thickness of a route line.
Side note: The width of a route line (known as “x”) is the building block of the Tube Map, and many other measurements are derived from it: it’s the x-height of text labels, while an interchange symbol has a diameter of 3x. This is also the minimum allowed inner radius for a route line when it changes direction. Labels are set 1.33x away from the edge of route lines, a tick is a 0.667x square, and so on. It’s all related!
However, the accessibility icons can’t overlap without one icon partially obscuring the other and the connecting bar between the two circles being completely lost. So the circles and their respective route lines have to be set a little further apart (with a very odd gap of 2.19x by my calculations, compared to the 1.5x minimum possible gap). A difference of 0.69x may not seem like much, but the tighter spacing definitely helps the Metropolitan/Jubilee line pairing from St. Johns Wood to Wembley Park work together as a coherent element. It also saves a surprising amount of space in other places, which helps the map feel a little lighter and more spacious throughout.
Alignment of elements is something I worked incredibly hard on to restore the diagram-like qualities of the map. Stations line up with each other across the map: see from Northfields on the Piccadilly all the way across to Embankment. Below that, Gunnersbury, West Brompton and Waterloo align; and then Fulham Broadway, Pimlico and Lambeth North. The northern branch of the Bakerloo line aligns vertically with the Hammersmith & City line, the DLR into Stratford International aligns diagonally with the Overground line above it. Across the top of the map, Watford, Watford Junction, High Barnet, Enfield Town and Chingford all line up perfectly. This intentional alignment creates an invisible grid that standardises and unifies the whole map.
Other smaller changes:
Inclusion of Crossrail wasn’t as hard as I expected, although the “mega-stations” at Farringdon/Barbican and Moorgate/Liverpool Street are pretty unwieldy. I did manage to keep it dead straight between Bond Street and Whitechapel, which is nice. Added bonus: the return of Beck’s beautiful “TO” box to indicate stations off the western edge of the map.
Some more accurate station location, especially at the eastern end of the Victoria line, where the Overground line is now correctly shown to the south of Seven Sisters, not the north. Bethnal Green and Shoreditch High Street Overground stations are now located in the correct place relative to the Central line. The Overground passes between St. Johns Wood and Swiss Cottage on its way to Euston.
General straightening of Overground lines, especially from Canonbury to Stratford and the whole southern orbit from Clapham Junction to the (soon to open) New Bermondsey station. The loop into Clapham Junction from Imperial Wharf mimics the real-life layout of the station and helps to reinforce that you have to change trains there, but may be a little bit overbearing. I’ll have to think about that one.
White strokes separating route lines when they cross but don’t otherwise interact. The official map does this inconsistently, so I decided to carry it across the whole map. I think it works, especially in the north-east part of the map where a lot of routes cross over each other.
Removal of interchange circles at stations where the interchange is only with National Rail. The NR arrow does the work here, and it’s ridiculous to have an interchange circle sitting on a single Underground line by itself, like what used to be at South Ruislip. Note also that I’ve removed the ridiculous north-western alignment of the Piccadilly/Metropolitan lines west of Rayners Lane.
More accurate drawing that adheres to the design rules of the map better. At Earl’s Court, I was able to expand the District line curve around to Kensington (Olympia) into a proper 3x-radius half-circle, unlike the official map, which cheats its little heart out to make things fit (see below).
Really little things: Throwback water lines on the Thames. Routing information on the map for London Fields and Cambridge Heath Overground stations. Lord’s cricket ground. Abbey Road clarification in the legend. Flipping the river service and coach icons so they’re travelling to the right of the map (forwards with our left-to-right reading logic), rather than to the left.
You’ve made it this far? Congratulations, here’s a couple of before-and-after views for you to finish things off! The first gives a general comparative overview of the two maps, and the second rejoices in the fact that I made the “thermos flask” completely symmetrical (though it’s more of a “wine bottle” now, I think!)
The fairly new Metrolink map I came across caught my eye because of the way LA Metro is integrated, showing the termini of lines that don’t even come close to touching Metrolink’s network. Also of note is the prominent inclusion of the Amtrak Surfliner and the Coaster/Sprinter further south.
Transit Maps says:
When your commuter rail system spans six populous Southern Californian counties, it’s a nice touch to indicate how you interface with other transportation options. So the inclusion of these other rail systems on this map (designed by CHK America, who else?) is very welcome indeed, especially the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner, which actively supplements Metrolink services along the LOSSAN (Los Angeles–San Diego–San Luis Obispo) rail corridor.
You could almost say that the inclusion of the LA Metro is simply to fill up a large and otherwise empty space on the map– as it really only interchanges with Metrolink at Union Station and Chatsworth (at the end of the Orange Line) – but it’s nice to be reminded of the major rapid transit option in the area. The placement of the North Hollywood Metro station perhaps makes transferring to Bob Hope Airport look a little easier than it might actually be: they’re about three miles apart, although there are decent connecting local bus services.
The map itself is nicely executed: clean, simple and diagrammatic. County lines and future stations are both nicely integrated, and there’s a good flow to the whole thing. Perhaps the blue used for the ocean is a little too dark, but that’s a very minor observation.
Our rating: A nice, competently drawn overview of Metrolink and complementary rail services. Three-and-a-half stars.
Submitted by Ilya, whose previous work has been featured here on the blog.
Figuring that a schematic diagram of a single line subway system is little more than a glorified list (which is basically true), Ilya and Pasha have instead created a rather lovely stylised – but geographically faithful – map of Ekaterinburg’s simple Metro system. In a way, it reminds me of turn-of-the-20th-century railway maps, where the route lines would literally be overprinted onto an existing street map of the city.
The bold black route stands out perfectly from the subtle shades of the background, which includes streets, parks, the river Iset (beautifully rendered) and the most prominent landmark of all, the abandoned and unfinished 220-metre tall TV Tower. Exits are shown and numbered for each station, and a full list of connecting buses, trolleybuses and trams is also provided – useful information! My only minor complaint is that the grey text used for the Roman transliteration of each station’s name is perhaps a little light, especially at Geologicheskaya, where the background is the most detailed. I’d also like to see the transliteration directly adjacent to the Cyrillic name, rather than being separated by the connecting services information, just to reinforce their relationship to each other.
Our rating: A lovely solution for a small single-line system. Pleasing to look at and full of useful information. Four stars!
