Submission – Virginia Railway Express Commuter Rail Map, 2015

December 14, 2015
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Submitted by Edward Russell, whose photo of this map in situ can be seen here. Edward says:

Virginia Railway Express (VRE) updated their map with the addition of the Spotsylvania station on the Fredericksburg (red) line in November. It’s much cleaner than their former map, which included the numerous meanders on the lines and lacked clean 90-degree or 45-degree angles.

The new map is just straight lines with a clean 45-degree split where the Manassas (blue) line breaks off from the Fredericksburg line. I’d say it is a solid map for a simple system.

Transit Maps says:

“Solid” is a good word to describe this effort – it gets the job done: no more, no less. The routes are kept as simple as possible, the type (Gill Sans, deployed nicely) is clean as easy to read, and there’s an easy to comprehend legend.

Personally, I find the treatment of the Potomac a little uneven and wobbly. There are better ways to draw rivers in Illustrator than to make a path for each bank separately, such as drawing a single, central path and then using the Width tool or a width profile to make the path get evenly and gradually wider from one end of the path to the other.

I’m also not really thrilled with the way that the District Diamond has been laid on its side. It’s probably meant to reflect that the alignment of the Fredricksburg Line isn’t truly north-south, but it just looks odd on an otherwise diagrammatic map to rotate the diamond in an effort to match “reality” so closely.

Also of interest is the appropriation of the Washington DC Metro’s famous “target” interchange symbols for stations that are shared between the two VRE lines. Association by imitation?

Our rating: Unremarkable in many ways, but an improvement on what came before. Two-and-a-half stars.

Source: Official VRE website

Video: “Stations – A Quick Scan Through NYC” by Snowday

December 9, 2015
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Just a couple of glimpses of the subway map at the beginning, but I still love this short video featuring the stations of the New York Subway and the people who pass through it every day. Having just returned from a trip to the Big Apple, I wish I had the ability to capture the lifeblood of the city as well as this.

Source: Snowday/Vimeo

Photo: Cross-Stitch Transit Maps!

December 9, 2015
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Simply adorable cross-stitch versions of the (2025) Singapore MRT/LRT and London Underground (sans Overground lines) transit maps.

Source: Metafiktion/Instagram – link no longer active

Fantasy Future Map: Boston MBTA Commuter Rail North-South Link

December 8, 2015
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A fairly rudimentary map used to promote a European S-Bahn-style central rail tunnel under Boston to link North and South stations and provide through-running commuter rail services. An interesting idea, although I’m not sure that Boston has quite recovered from the last tunnel they built just yet. 

The map is functional enough, but could perhaps benefit from a little more “zing” to help it be the true centrepiece of the campaign. Personally, I’d like to see a little more differentiation between the commuter rail lines and the intersecting “T” lines in the central tunnel. The route lines become a bit tangled as they enter and exit the central spine of the network, mainly because most of the routes seem to cross over from one side of the map to the other as they pass from north to south. People with more local knowledge than I could perhaps comment on the reasoning behind these operational patterns; the website the map comes from doesn’t shed much light on the subject.

Our rating: An interesting concept for the future of commuter rail in Boston, but a fairly lacklustre imagining of that bold future. Two stars.

Source: North South Rail Link website

Visualization – Subway Systems at the Same Scale by Neil Freeman

December 2, 2015
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We’ve covered to-scale maps on Transit Maps before (See here and here), but I do really like this poster of every subway/rapid transit system in the world – 140 in all – to scale, organised by system size by Neil Freeman. Posters are available from his website for $20 plus postage – a late addition to the Holiday Gift Guide!

Source: Fake is the New Real

Unofficial Map: Mexico City Metro by Richard Archambault

December 2, 2015
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Following on from my previous post, here’s an unofficial map for the Mexico City Metro that makes full use of the Lance Wyman icons. It’s designed by Richard Archambault, who also works on the essential Jetpack for WordPress.

As can be seen from the archival photo above, the Wyman design team explored a purely iconic treatment of the Metro map, apparently eschewing station names altogether. Admittedly, the system was much simpler back then, with only lines 1, 2 and 3 present in the mockup as shown on the wall.

As we know, the official map has since moved away from this approach and no longer features the icons at all. So what would a modern Mexico City Metro map that used icons look like? That’s what Richard’s map sets out to show, and it’s a surprising contrast to the disappointing official map. 

Richard has painstakingly vectorised all the icons (around 200 or so!) from the bitmap versions available on the STC’s website to use in the map, and I really appreciate the way that he’s made them big and bold – it’s certainly very evocative of Wyman’s original concept.

The “big and bold” approach almost forces the map into being more evenly spaced and less cramped in the centre of the map when compared to the official map – the icons always take up a certain amount of space, which in turn creates space around them. Richard also keeps his route lines as straight as possible, which suits the minimalist aesthetic of the map nicely. Yes, there’s some odd angles here and there, but I don’t really find them distracting in the context of the whole map. Richard also includes the Tren Ligero line in its entirety – nicely differentiated by placing its icons in circles – something the official map relegates to a vague arrow and caption.

The labelling of stations is perhaps a little pedestrian (a version with no labels at all like the Wyman concept would be interesting), and the line numbers at the end of each line could perhaps do with a little bit of differentiation from the station icons next to them. They’re the same size, shape and colour, and can be read as an extra station at first glance. Reducing them in size, or perhaps having them as white shapes with the text and a border stroke in the line colour could do the trick.

Best of all, Richard’s map has been featured in the new edition of Mark Ovenden’s Transit Maps of the World. Having gotten no response from the STC regarding inclusion of their official map, Mark reached out to Richard and basically commissioned him to update his map for use in the book. Awesome!

Our rating: Shows that an iconic approach to the Mexico City Metro is perfectly valid, and certainly produces a more attractive and usable map than the official one. Three stars!

Side note: I’ve only just noticed that the icon for the “Oceania” station is a kangaroo, while that of “Deportiva Oceania” is a koala with a soccer ball. Australia represent!

Official Map: Mexico City Metro, Mexico, 2015

December 1, 2015
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Strangely, I’ve never talked about this system map on the blog before. So this is the map that’s available for download as a PDF on the STC’s website and basically, it’s a giant pile of spaghetti thrown on the page. 

The centre of the map is so cramped and crowded that labels almost overlap each other as well as the route lines. No explanation is given for the “MB” icon near some stations (it’s to represent an interchange with nearby Metrobus services, but nothing on the map tells you that). I’ve also never seen a route line that’s two-toned, like the silver-and-green Line B, and I’m not sure I like it very much.

However, the real shame with this map is the complete absence of the famous Lance Wyman-designed icons for each of the stations. They’re utilised extensively on strip maps on trains and at stations, so it’s more than a little odd that they’re not leveraged in the map at all. More on that soon.

Our rating: A really disappointing map, hardly representative of one of the world’s great metro systems. One-and-a-half stars.

Source: STC official site

Unofficial Map: Chicago “El” in the Style of Frank Lloyd Wright by Maxwell Roberts

November 29, 2015
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Words cannot express just how much I love this beautiful, beautiful map by Maxwell Roberts, whose work I’ve featured on the blog many times previously. I had the privilege of seeing this map “in the flesh” at the New York Transit Museum event I attended earlier this month, and it looks even more impressive as an actual print.

The map is inspired by the work of the famous architect and designer, Frank Lloyd Wright – most obviously by his stained glass work – and it’s a wonderful homage to his style, especially regarding the typographical and colour choices. And it actually works really nicely as a map as well! I note with pleasure that repeated station names – Cicero, Pulaski, Harlem, etc. – are placed properly relative to the city’s grid, which is a very nice touch indeed. The Loop inset is nicely handled, although you could perhaps argue that the station name labels for the Loop stations on the main map are therefore redundant and could perhaps be omitted for clarity.

Personally, I find some of Max’s transit maps to be very technical explorations of design and usability theory – fascinating, well-drawn and very worthy, but sometimes a little dry in character. This however, is art, and I think it’s simply gorgeous. 5 stars!

Prints of this map – and many others – are available on Max’s website from £30 for UK orders, and £36 (about $55) for international orders. Consider this added to the 2015 gift guide! 

Source: Tube Map Central (Maxwell Roberts’ website)

Work in Progress: New Circular Paris Metro Map

November 26, 2015
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Via: parismetromap:

The New Paris Metro Map is developing. The final version will be soon… within one to two months.

An RATP logo for the blog this originated from, but surely this is not a reworking of the actual official Métro map? Anyone have any more details on this at all?

The idea of making a circle out of Lines 2 and 6 is interesting, but the spaghetti-like tangle of routes contained within that circle is quite frightening. Definitely a work in progress, whoever is working on it… station dots out of place, line numbers missing, etc. The curved shape described by stations where three or more lines meet is interesting, but I’m less sure about the multi-coloured gradient strokes used on them… it makes these major stations blend in with the surrounding lines, when they should stand out and be immediately visible.

It’ll certainly be interesting to see the final completed map, that’s for sure!

EDIT: In world record time, I’ve been told that the map is an unofficial work by graphic designer and art director, Constantine Konovalov. Well, that clears things up nicely! 

Submission – Unofficial Future Map: Washington DC Metro by James Gibbons

November 26, 2015
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Submitted by James, who says:

My redesign of the DC metro system, with the purple line and silver lines in their completed states. I wanted to do a Vignelli-style map of the system in DC, which I believe complements the relative simplicity of the system well.

Regarding the abolition of the red line kink on the western arm: I think one bend to indicate the kink is still sufficient and recognizable.

Transit Maps says:

James is right when he says that the minimalism of a Vignelli-style map matches the relative simplicity of the system, and overall, this is a very competent and pleasing map. However, there’s a few problems with it that I can see.

First, while the subdued colour scheme looks nice, it does reduce the contrast between the route lines quite a bit. While this is probably okay for regular users, colour-blind readers are really going to struggle. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that James hasn’t provided an alternative way to distinguish between the lines on the map. To a colour-blind user, the Red and Green lines look almost identical – without a legend to the lines and something similar to the real map’s “RL” and “GL” bullets, working out which is which for a colour-deficient rider unfamiliar with the system is going to be very hard work indeed. Personally, I’d replace James’ fare information table (which would require a reprint of the map every time the fares went up, and is information probably best left to ticket vending machines anyway) with a properly colour-coded legend to the lines.

I also think that James could have pushed the minimalism of the map further to truly embrace Vignelli’s principles of unadorned diagrammatic map design. He’s straightened out the infamous kink in the western leg of the Red Line and shows the Silver Line as being laser-straight (which it isn’t), but he’s retained the little wiggle in the Green/Yellow lines at Columbia Heights. Vignelli would almost certainly have argued that the wiggle is inconsequential information in relation to how the nodes of the network fit together and would have excised it.

Similarly, the very uneven spacing of stations along the Purple Line is something that I believe Vignelli would have addressed, even if it meant moving Fort Totten further south and respacing other stations to facilitate it. Remember: this is a diagram, not a map! As much as possible, an even, harmonious distance between stops is desired. To that end, I’d even advocate removing county lines from the map to simplify things even further: the District Diamond and the Potomac are really enough to orient users. However, if James chooses to retain county lines, then he needs to add one for Loudoun County just before the Dulles Airport station on the Silver Line.

The diagonal label for Federal Center SW looks really out of place among all those lovely horizontal labels in the centre of the map, but I’d probably make all of the labels for the Purple Line between Silver Spring and College Park angled – a necessary evil! – instead of flipping the last two back to horizontal, which kind of upsets the reading flow. Labels should always be in the “expected” place to make things easy for the reader.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like this map! However, usability for all users is a key consideration in transit map design, and homages to a particular style can be tricky to pull off well – especially something as definitive as Massimo Vignelli’s minimalist design approach.