How Should the Purple Line Appear on the Washington, DC Metro Map?

July 17, 2015
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It’s a great question, and one that regular Transit Maps contributor Peter Dovak addresses over at the Greater Greater Washington website. A series of maps runs through a variety of options, each with its own pros and cons. Making Lance Wyman’s chunky style work with an increasingly complex system is a real challenge, but Peter’s definitely come up with some workable ideas. The one above uses a thinner route line for the Purple Line, which works well, but the alternative which only shows the route line with no station names is also quite attractive, if a little less informational.

Head on over to read the whole article and see all the alternatives – great exploratory design work!

Unofficial Map: Metro Map of Sofia, Bulgaria by “Save Sofia”

July 17, 2015
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Submitted by Andrej Zografski, who says:

Our NGO Spasi Sofia/Save Sofia, (founded and run by five forum members of the SkyScraperCity) have designed and implemented new signs for Sofia metro. It is our free gift to the society we live in and input towards a better, more organized and welcoming Bulgarian capital. Now the first test stage is being implemented, and if it is successful in September we should put the new signs in the whole system.

For now we have made geographical maps of Sofia and the metro in the trains and a new type of signs for Sofia metro on Mladost 1 station (where you can transfer between the two lines). The signs are bilingual, have tourist information and make the Airport connection by metro very easy for foreigners.

We would love to hear from you, as foreigner which is not familiar with the city. We are now collecting opinions and critics, so we can improve our design. It will be very helpful and very much appreciated.

Best regards

Andrej and the team of Spasi Sofia

More info on our Facebook page or website.

Transit Maps says:

Over the years of running this blog, some of my favourite posts have been about these unofficial projects created by people who just want something better for the cities they live in. This map follows in the footsteps of Viteks Bariševs’ map of Riga, Latvia and Igor Skliarevsky’s wonderful map of Kiev, Ukraine, and is a worthy companion to both of them. 

The new metro map itself is certainly much clearer than what’s currently being used, which confusingly shows both the line segments as they were constructed (Line 1 and Line 2 in bold colours) and the actual operating routes (M1 and M2 in lighter colours, almost unnoticeable against the busy background). It’s a bizarre decision and certainly not very user-friendly! The Save Sofia map wisely does away with the extraneous line segment information and simply presents the two “M” routes in thick, bold lines above a nicely simplified representation of the city. A gorgeous colour palette enhances the design further. 

Interchanges, railroad stations, the main bus station, park-and-rides and the airport are all given clear, visually distinct icons which match the feel of the rest of the map nicely. 

A legend underneath the map shows points of interest near three of the main Metro stations – with beautiful custom icons – but it’s a bit of a shame that these icons aren’t somehow cross-referenced on the actual map to allow for even better tourist orientation. This is the only problem I really have with the map, which is otherwise superb.

Even better is that the new Metro map is just a part of a suite of well-considered wayfinding signage – line maps for platforms and directional signage to guide travellers through the station. At present, the system is being tested in just one station, but I’m certainly hopeful that it will bring a positive reaction and wider adoption throughout the system.

Our rating: A labour of love, and it shows through in the end result. Simply lovely work that achieves all the goals that Andrej and his team set out to do. Four-and-a-half stars.

Transit Service Cuts In San Juan, Puerto Rico

July 17, 2015
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Map showing high-frequency public transport map of San Juan, Puerto Rico before and after service cuts proposed for August 1, 2015.

Ouch. Austerity isn’t just for Greece, folks.

Source: Victor Ramirez via reddit/r/transit

Future Map – Regional Transit for Atlanta, Georgia by Jason Lathbury

July 16, 2015
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I noticed a spike in my web stats coming from the Curbed Atlanta website over the last couple of days… so I traced them back to this interesting map of a hypothetical future Atlanta. It turns out that the hits to my site were because one commenter had volunteered the map to my “Hall of Shame”, complete with a link. Ouch. 

Now, while I don’t think that the map is anywhere near awful enough to enter those un-hallowed halls, I do have some problems with it design-wise. Because the map is based almost slavishly on the current official map, it has an incredibly dense centre but vast expanses of open space toward the outer edges of the map. The middle therefore becomes an almost illegible tangle of route lines, icons and station labels – so much so that I actually see very little value in adding the myriad streetcar routes that Jason shows, because it’s just too hard to work out what’s going on. 

As is often the case with a diagrammatic map of a complex system, the central part of the map needs to be expanded to allow more breathing room, while the edges can be condensed to reduce wasted space. It’s unreasonable to expect a design – one that currently only has to show Atlanta’s relatively simple MARTA system – to continue to function well under all the extra visual burden of this extensive multi-modal future.

Our rating: What works for the goose doesn’t always work for the gander – too much information crammed into a framework that was never really designed for it. An interesting look at Atlanta’s potential transit future, but needs some extensive reworking in my eyes. Two stars.

Source: Curbed Atlanta (read the comments for some insight from Jason on the design)

Reader Question: Have You Seen a Christchurch “Tube Map” Tea Towel?

July 15, 2015
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Question: Several years ago I was in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a friend had a tea towel with a (fictitious) underground transit map of the city, in the style of the London Underground. I’ve searched long and hard for it, or its creators, to no avail. The best I turned up were a few pictures, which I collected on a Pinterest board. Have you encountered it, or ones like it?

Answer: I hadn’t actually seen or heard of this before, but some quick Googling found what I think you’re describing on a New Zealand-based online store’s website (link no longer active). It’s out of stock (of course), and it still doesn’t give any credit to the creators, but at least it proves that it exists! 

Or should I say existed? Because looking at it, I would not be at all surprised if Transport for London had actually issued a “cease and desist” order on the tea towel’s design. They can be pretty unforgiving when people use the Underground roundel, Johnston Sans and other recognisable design elements of the Tube Map without authorisation, and this tea towel certainly does that!

Submission – Houston METRORail Future System Plan

July 15, 2015
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Submitted by Caden, who just enigmatically comments, “Houston: sigh”

Transit Maps says:

Caden’s sigh took me a little while to interpret (is he in love?), but I’m going to take a guess that he’s actually referencing some grand rapid transit plans – in a very car-centric city – that are now beginning to fade away. While the Red, (Green) East End and (Purple) Southeast lines are now operational, funding for the Blue University Line has completely dried up and the Gold Uptown Line looks like it’ll be reinvented as a (much cheaper) Bus Rapid Transit line instead of light rail.

At least this map of those plans is quite lovely, with confident, bold 30/60-degree angles and a nice usage of everyone’s favourite sans serif typeface, Gotham. The colour palette is also excellent, and the secondary highway grid is nicely understated. Black station labels neatly indicate an open (or just about to open) station, while grey type indicates a station still in planning. However, some of the angled station labels are a bit unfortunate, especially on the section of the University Line between Almeda and Tsu stations, where they’re angled in the same direction as the route line itself.

Our rating: Really quite nice, although we’ll just have to wait and see if the reality ever matches the dream. Sigh. 3 stars.

Source: GoMETRORail.org website – link no longer active

Reader Question: What’s a Good Size to Draw a Transit Map?

July 14, 2015
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Reader Question: I dabble a bit in designing fictional transit maps,but I’ve always wondered about these two questions (if I may). 1) What is a standard and/or good canvas size when drawing a map? 2) When drawing a map where you want to indicate multimodality, but give priority to one mode (say, a metro map showing light rail or commuter connections), how is that best achieved? Is it preferable to use icons at stations or a light silhouette of the lines (or both, or neither)?

Answers: 1) There’s no standard size, per se, but some good starting points would be a square, a 3:2 ratio (e.g., 36″ wide x 24″ deep), or a 4:3 ratio (e.g., 36″ wide by 27″ deep). If you use the metric system, setting your artwork up to conform to the standard “A-series” paper ratio of 1.414:1 could be a good thing as well, as it would allow you to scale your artwork up or down easily to any “A” paper size (yet another reason why metric makes more sense than Imperial measurements).

2) You’ll often hear me talk about “informational hierarchy” in a transit map. This is exactly what I’m talking about – giving the most important part of the map the strongest visual treatment, then placing the other elements in a descending order of visual importance under that. How that is achieved is up to each designer, but usual methods include thinner route lines and more subdued colours. My best advice is to look at other multimodal maps and see what they do. One of my favourites is this fantastic map of greater Paris. In the example you quote, icons work best if you simply want to indicate that an interchange to another mode can be made, while route lines are better if you think that map users need to see where that alternate mode can actually take them.

GIF – The Longest Possible New York Subway Ride?

July 11, 2015
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The New York Subway is famous for having a flat fare for any ride within the system – be it for just a couple of stops, or an epic end-to-end trek. So long as you don’t pass through a fare gate, you can pretty much go anywhere!

WNYC is having fun with that fare structure to find the longest possible ride you can take without reusing a section of track. Their initial record – as shown in this mesmerising GIF – was 149.8 miles and required 55 transfers. Since then, the record has ben upped to 154.6 miles with one less transfer while still starting and finishing at the same two stations.  

datanews:

In Search of the Longest Subway Ride

We set out to calculate the longest ride you can take with one Metrocard swipe (not going over the same stretch twice), and after we posted it, someone’s browser found an even LONGER one!

Fantasy Map: St. Jacques Metro Map by “Green Kitten”

July 10, 2015
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Um, wow? An incredibly detailed transit network for the fictional metropolis of “St. Jacques” drawn and lettered entirely by hand on what looks like 12 sheets of A4 paper. 

Obviously taking its design and geography cues from London – the symbology used is almost identical to the Tube Map, it has a river that crosses from east to west just south of the city centre, an airport to the southwest and a pretty good analog for the Hainault loop to the northeast, albeit in green and not red – this is still incredibly impressive work, requiring dedication and perseverance. I’ve seen snippets of this project on-line before, so I know that it’s gone through multiple revisions and incarnations to get to this (final?) stage.

The system shown is seriously multi-modal as well, with 18 Underground lines, 5 Overground lines, light rail, trams, buses, ferries, and – again, just like London – an aerial cable car over the river. Hopefully, the good people of St. Jacques appreciate it more than Londoners do their version!

Source: Green Kitten/Flickr 

Submission – Unofficial Map: St. Petersburg Metro, Russia by “Kilo”

July 10, 2015
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Submitted by the author, who says:

So, for a high school art project, I decided to make a system map for the St. Petersburg Metro. I spent about a half-month studying the system and the stations, getting some Russian friends to translate the station names, and prototyping the pipes in Inkscape (didn’t have Illustrator), eventually coming up with this design.

Now that I’m in college and in the process of trying to apply for a second major, I thought that I’d dig up some old projects to pad my portfolio. And, since hindsight is 20/20 (there are no rounded corners, I’m not sure the whole bilingual thing is working out, the lettering gets pretty tight in places, and the only font I could find with Cyrillic support was Roboto) and I now have a copy of Illustrator (and a chance to use that nifty Live Corner feature you blogged about), I was wondering if you could give me tips on how to improve upon the design.

Transit Maps says:

All in all, I think this is a pretty solid effort: nice work! Everything’s laid out nice and clearly and some good thought has gone into the general layout. One thing I would definitely encourage with any future revisions would be to try and make the style of the map a little less “generic”. As I’ve said many times before, the very best transit maps have a sense of place about them – they could only ever belong to the city they represent – but this map carries too many instantly recognisable London Tube Map elements (station ticks. “t-bar” terminus stations and “dumbbell” interchange symbols) to stand as a unique piece of design. 

A few other ideas for improvement: I think that your bilingual labels look fine on the map in most instances, but I question the value of a direct translation to English from Cyrillic. It’s never going to be written like that anywhere in St. Petersburg, and I doubt that most of the names would ever actually be said that way, even if a local was speaking English to you. Most bilingual Russian transit maps choose instead to transliterate the Cyrillic into Roman characters (i.e., it’s still in Russian, but written with English language letters). This at least gives English speakers a chance at pronouncing the name correctly, and you may find it written like that in some places as well. I’ve also seen an alternate Moscow Metro map where the secondary name is written out phonetically, to maximise the probability that English users can both pronounce the name and understand it when it’s announced over a loudspeaker on a train or in a station. Genius!

I think that you really need to put “M<number>” markers at each end of the route lines. At the moment, the Red M1 and the Green M3 lines would appear almost identical to each other for a colour-blind user, and there’s nothing on the map that can be used to tell them apart, except for their colour. Accessibility of your design is hugely important and shouldn’t be overlooked, even for a relatively simple system like this.

Think about how you’re going to show future expansions of the system: the M4 line is going to extend westwards from its current terminus, which could cause problems with your current layout. Similarly, the M5 will expand southwards, but this shouldn’t cause you too many problems. Draw the map with these extensions in place!

I also think you’re missing a couple of railroad termini, upon comparing your map to the official one.

Like I said, this is a solid piece of work, but I think it could be better with a little more work. I admit, it can be difficult to create something that truly represents a city that you don’t reside in, but I’d definitely encourage you – and all amateur map-makers who want to submit to Transit Maps – to push your designs out of your comfort zone to create something amazing. We already know that Tube Map symbology works well enough, but try and find a new and individual approach if you can – and make your maps truly your own!