Not exactly a transit map but seeing your post with NY subway stations drawings recalled me this one. It’s a photo that I took in Dec 2004 – unfortunately it seems that the board has been removed long time ago during renovation works. I hope it is preserved somewhere.
There are two levels here for metro and trams (underground part of tram network is called pre-metro as it’s ready to be converted to a proper metro in the future). On both levels tram and metro go in opposite directions and can (dis)embark from both sides of carriages.
Transit Maps says:
What a great photo, Piotr! Even though you took the picture in 2004, I’d hazard a guess that the diagram actually dates from around 1993, when the pre-metro platforms were added to the station – the fact that the architectural and engineering firms are listed to the right would seem to support this theory. Then again, maybe it’s even from 1988 when the original Metro station opened!
Here’s a map that’s been doing the rounds over the last few days, and has now been sent my way by many, many readers (Thanks to all of you!). Compared to the familiar standard Tube map, It’s a more geographically accurate map of rail services in and around London (as of late 2014), and opinions on it seem to be quite divided. Some people think it’s more useful than the normal Tube map, some think it beautiful, while others think it’s a horrendous tangle of spaghetti.
It’s kind of all those things at once for me: it’s very cool to see how all these routes actually look in real life (spaghetti certainly springs to mind!), and the map is very well drawn with a nicely subdued supporting colour palette underneath the bright hues of all the rail lines. It’s especially interesting to see how the lines relate to the built-up urban areas, as shown in beige on the map. The map also makes far more sense of the tangle of Northern Line tracks between Euston and Camden Town than the Tube Map ever has – Mornington Crescent is finally in the right place! However, the curve of the westernmost branch of the Northern Line as it heads north is greatly exaggerated for clarity. The map is more geographically accurate, but not totally so!
However, if I just wanted to catch the Tube from Point A to Point B, I’d still greatly prefer the diagrammatic simplicity of the real Tube Map. The very fact that this map needs an enlarged inset for central London shows the main weakness of a geographical map like this for transit wayfinding. There’s simply too many stations in the middle of the map for them to be shown clearly and effectively. I’d argue that this map is even less useful than its nearest direct analogue, the New York subway map, as the area covered is just so vast. On the NY map, you can see how each stop relates to its immediate neighbourhood, but that’s much more difficult with this map’s scale.
Our rating: This map is fantastic for detailed examination, but for quickly navigating the network, give me a diagram every time! Looks great though, and I’ve definitely pored over its details for quite a while. Three-and-a-half stars.
I’m really liking these fantastic axonometric projections of New York Subway station complexes by architect Candy Chan.
This type of view isn’t anything revolutionary or new – see this fabulous diagram of London’s Piccadilly Circus tube station from 1929, for example – but these are all executed very deftly. The cleverly exaggerated vertical scale does a good job of preventing upper platforms and mezzanine levels from obscuring important detail below them, while the street level is indicated only by thin dashed lines and street names.
More station diagrams can be seen on Candy’s project website, and there are posters for sale as well!
(And yes, I adore the fact that the Columbus Circle diagram is contained within a circle.)
I know how you don’t like many airway maps trying to be schematic, but this one is a rather successful combination of a simplified geographical map and a schematic inset showing frequencies throughout the year. Although it has some minor beauty flaws here and there, it is really a beautiful map, especially considering the five colours used to print the map! What do you say?
Transit Maps says:
Mattias, I think this is absolutely wonderful, and certainly something that the new airlinemaps Tumblr should see!
Airline travel was still relatively new in 1936, with commercial fixed-wing services having commenced in 1914, just 22 years previously. Imperial Airways – the predecessor of BOAC and then British Airways – was only formed in 1924, but expanded rapidly throughout the British Commonwealth, as helpfully shown in the detailed pink sections of the map above. Most Imperial Airways planes were small, carrying 20 passengers or less, and still had to “hop” from destination to destination along their routes. Transatlantic services – hinted at on this map as “projected services” – were still not practicably feasible.
The main map of services is lovely enough, but the diagrammatic representation of service frequencies is quite fantastic. It takes the solid yellow route lines from the main map (the Imperial Airways and associated companies routes) and reinterprets them in schematic form. It uses a complex but visually distinct legend to denote both service frequency and operating company, making it very information-rich. As an added bonus, it even includes mileage from London for each destination. And I agree: the whole map looks great despite the limitations of early-20th century printing technology!
Our rating: A fantastic piece of ephemera from the early days of commercial aviation. Five stars!
Reader Chris Bastian notes that the 7 Line’s extension to 34th Street-Hudson Yards (that opened today!) has been added to MTA’s Vignelli-style “Weekender” map.
I’ll say that it looks pretty good, but Vignelli’s famous “one dot equals one stop” principle seems to have been broken at Times Sq/42nd and Grand Central/42nd, where one dot now seems to serve both the “S” and the “7″. Compare the “S” to the “L”, which has its own terminus dot at the 14th Av/8th Ave complex, while the “S” no longer does at either end.
Portland’s new Orange Line light rail opens tomorrow!
And while I’m excited, I’ve long wondered why exactly it’s being called the Orange Line instead of just being an extension of the Yellow Line. I’ve heard mutterings that it allows operational flexibility – with some northbound Orange Line trains becoming Green Line trains if demand requires it – but that’s always seemed like pretty weak reasoning to me.
And this promotional map almost entirely abandons that idea anyway, boasting of a “one-seat ride between North Portland and Milwaukie”… as would be made much clearer to riders if it was just the Yellow Line from end to end in the first place.
Instead, the brochure has to explain that trains change their route designation from Yellow to Orange after Interstate/Rose Quarter on southbound runs, and from Orange to Yellow after Lincoln/SW 3rd on northbound runs. How does that make transit easier to use and simpler to understand for users? It seems to me that an operational desire (potential interlining of routes) has trumped a passenger need (easy to understand routing information), and that’s not a good thing.
As I see it, the whole Orange Line brand really comes down more to marketing than anything else – it’s easier to sell a sexy “new” light rail line to the public and media than a boring old extension of an already-existing line.
Please take a look at the transit map of Geneva ! It’s beautiful. It includes streetcars and all buses.
Transit Maps says:
Okay, Nicholas, I will!
I even know who designed this map: it’s a collaboration between designer Andrea Forgacs and architect Oscar Buson, and seems to be part of a suite of maps that include the urban core (this map), the greater suburban area, a night services map and fare zone map, all built using a common design language. I’ve included a couple of mock-up images from Andrea’s website to illustrate the other maps – the night map seems to have quite a lot in common with one that I’ve previously seen from Zurich.
The main map is indeed quite gorgeous, although it has one little quirk in that all modes – be they tram, trolleybus or bus – are all depicted in the same way: as a thick, coloured line for ligne principale routes, and as a thinner grey line for ligne secondaire routes (although I believe these are all buses). It’s an interesting “mode agnostic” approach that instead focusses on level of service, which is not a bad thing. Locals would have little problem with it, as they would know route numbers, although I can see it perhaps presenting some problems for visitors who are unfamiliar with the vagaries of Geneva’s route numbering system.
Although not explicitly mentioned in the legend, there is some internal logic to the colour-coding in that the suburban bus routes – which have letters as their route designation – are all pink or orange in colour.
Technically, the map’s really well drawn: everything’s nice and clear with a very consistently applied visual hierarchy. Nothing feels too crowded, which is a real achievement with a system map of this complexity. I especially appreciate the effort put into making the rivers and lake shoreline match the visual style of the route lines, something that’s often neglected or shoddily done.
Our rating: I’m still undecided whether or not I entirely approve of the “mode neutral” treatment of the services, but the execution of the map as a whole is top-notch! Four stars.
This brand new map was sent my way by quite a few people last week, so here it is! If the name “Ilya Birman” sounds familiar, it’s because his map of the Moscow Metro came second in the design competition a few years ago that was eventually won by Art Lebedev Studios. I wrote about Ilya’s entry here at the time.
Now, Ilya and designer Alexander Karavaev have turned their attention to the tram network of the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, creating this brand new official map. (And if the name “Chelyabinsk” sounds familiar, that’s because it’s where that giant meteor explosion was caught on dashcam a few years back.)
The map is a very handsome diagrammatic representation of the network with a few design innovations that I haven’t seen before. The most noticeable is the slightly flared, almost trapezoidal marker for stations. They certainly do the job with style, and it’s nice to see something different from the usual London Underground-styled “tick”.
I’m not quite so enamoured with the terminus station route number designations, which seem a little over-designed to me. The faux perspective as the route lines rush “upwards” towards the viewer together with the angle and shiny glow of the route number boxes is just too much. The blurb on the projects website boldly declares that these are “the most beautiful termini symbol(s) in the history of transport infographics”, but I just can’t agree with that. I applaud Ilya and Alex for trying something new and out of the box, but I don’t think it quite comes off.
More successful is the slightly rough and uneven “pencil” treatment of the subsidiary grey bus and trolleybus lines. It looks great, and it’s not too forced or overdone. The subtle pattern in the green parkland areas is also quite nice, and I do love the inclusion of the children’s railway in the main park. The special permit zone for the tram line to the city’s metalworking factory is also deftly handled.
Our rating: A very attractive diagrammatic map with some innovative design features. Some come off, some don’t – but credit is due for pushing the envelope and trying new things! Three-and-a-half stars.
Source: Ilya and Alex’s project website (in Russian; lots of detail images)
A fairly bare-bones map of existing (black) and new (red) rail lines in the Baltic State of Latvia from 1938. It’s mainly interesting because it shows the five different railroad gauges in use at the time. Five! (Which is right up there with Australia’s infamous “gauge muddle”).
Long-time readers of the blog might know that one of my all-time favourite maps is this beautiful two-colour diagram of the Paris Métro from 1956. It’s stylish, beautiful to look at and easy to understand, even with just two printed colours – an elegant combination of blue and gold. (The background could be a cream paper, or it might be just aged and yellowed white paper: it’s hard to tell!) While the scan from the original source is high-resolution, it’s oversharpened and not suitable for anything other than viewing on a screen. So – as is my wont – I decided to redraw it in Adobe Illustrator, making it completely vector-based.
Here’s the end result (click the image for a larger preview). I strove to be as accurate as possible to the original piece, including the way that the blue ink overprints the gold ink. This required setting up a choke mask for the gold halftone tint area behind the blue route lines so that the two colours overlapped ever so slightly, but the gold dots didn’t show through the solid areas of blue. Old-school trapping work is fun!
Drawing the route lines was surprisingly easy, especially with Illustrator’s new Join and Corners tools, which allowed me to lay out straight sections of track, join them with one mouse flick and then visually modify the radius of corner joints until I got a perfect fit. A few graduated curves – which would originally have been made with french curves – had to be drawn manually with the Pen tool. I note that the original map was remarkably consistent with its curved corners, using only a few standard values throughout the whole map.
Typography was more challenging – a combination of perfect matches (Engraver’s Gothic for the Plan de Paris title at top right and the Ligne de Sceaux legend), serendipitous substitutions for the original typeface (with a few tweaks, Proxima Nova Condensed turned out to be very similar indeed to the gothic font used for station labels), and some good, old-fashioned redrawing of the fonts I simply couldn’t match.
The Art Deco-styled Métro label at the top left was simple enough, but the gorgeous script used for the locale names around the periphery of the map was another matter. Almost certainly hand-lettered originally, there wasn’t a modern computer font that even came close to matching its style and aesthetics. This meant laboriously tracing each letterform with the Pen tool: very few letters could be reused in other locations because almost every one was slightly different. It was definitely the most time-consuming part of the recreation, but totally worth it in the end!
The final obstacle to overcome was recreating the halftone dots used on the map – gold for the city limits and blue for the Seine. Creating good looking vector-based halftone dots in Illustrator is surprisingly difficult, with results that either look too digital and perfect, or create an unholy mess of millions of paths and anchor points. In the end, I made use of the Halftone.us Illustrator Tint Pack, a collection of lovely, organic-looking, seamless halftone pattern swatches from 5- to 90-percent grey. As you can see from the image to the left, they look fantastic and are very true to the original printed piece. I took great care to use the same line frequency and dot angle as the original map to complete the match.
Of course, once the map was completed, I could use it as a basis for two further related maps. First, a four-colour version using a contemporaneous map as my colour guide. The scan is low-resolution and a little dark, so there was a bit of guesswork involved, but it looks pretty awesome. Click on the map for a larger preview.
And finally, just for fun, a version of the map that uses the colours from the current official map. As forests and locale names don’t appear on the modern map, I had to come up with something that suited the colour palette myself. Click on the map for a larger preview.
