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!

Historical Map: New York “New Subway Routes” Map, 1967

July 9, 2015
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the-nycta-project:

“New Subway Routes” Map Possibly 1967?

Yes, this is the 1967 “New Subway Routes” map produced by the New York Transit Authority, designer unknown. The diagram was produced to show only the eight routes that had been changed with the opening of the tunnel under Chrystie Street. It’s an interesting piece because it was produced some three years before even the first draft Unimark/Massimo Vignelli diagram, but has seemingly been influenced by his approach to design. The straightening of route lines, the regular spacing of stations and the application of the famous “no dot, no stop” rule all seem to point towards Vignelli’s hand, although the non-standard angles of routes entering the Coney Island Stillwell Avenue station would never have been approved of by him.

Peter Lloyd, writing in his superb book, Vignelli Transit Maps, points to some anecdotal evidence that Unimark was advising the TA on the future direction of the subway map at the time and concludes that:

“… the connection between Vignelli’s influence and the 1967 map is not proven, but the alternative is to surmise a coincidence that strains credibility.”

GIF – Expansion of the Shanghai Metro, 1994-2014

July 6, 2015
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Wow. From nothing in 1993 to 14 lines, 338 stations and 548km (341 miles) of track – the longest rapid transit system by route length in the world – in 2015. A mere 8 million people use the system on an average weekday. Of interest is the massive expansion in the years leading up to the 2010 Shanghai Wold Expo.

See also this 1939 tram and trolleybus map of Shanghai’s International Settlement. 

Source: Wikimedia Commons/user: Terramorphous

Reader Question: Why Show the “Jog” in the DC Metro’s Red Line?

July 6, 2015
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Question from lukasmaps: On your DC Metro Map redesign, why do you show the little “jog” on the red line between Van Ness-UDC and Tenlyytown-AU? No offense to your excellent work, but it ruins the visual clarity shown on the rest of the map and frankly, gets on my nerves. Again, no offense to this otherwise beautiful map.

Answer: This is a fantastic question and one that I can use to illustrate how local knowledge of a transit system can help inform the design of a map. When I made the very first version of this map way back in February 2010, I did depict the eastern part of the Red Line as a straight run from Dupont Circle all the way to the end of the line at Shady Grove (as seen the first image above: I still have all the original files in my archives!). As you suggest, it seemed like a good solution to reduce clutter and enhance the clarity of the map.

However, when I released the map, the overwhelming majority of commenters from the DMV area called for the reinstatement of the “jog” between Van Ness and Tenleytown, which has always appeared on the official map. 

Why? Because the people who use the system on a daily basis use that “jog” – which occurs where the tracks shift from running under Wisconsin Avenue to under Connecticut Avenue, as seen in the Google Maps screenshot above – as part of their “mental map” of the system. It’s as much a landmark to them as any of the stations or tourist sites on the map, and its non-inclusion threw them for a loop. Other innovations and design changes in my map were widely well-received, but this one was definitely not. The very next iteration of my my map (v1.0.1) reinstated the jog, and it’s been there ever since, through four major revisions. I may be able to design a fantastic-looking map for the DC Metro, but I don’t live there – and sometimes it’s just best to bow to local knowledge and opinion when it comes to usability.

See also this post where I compare and contrast the four major revisions to my DC Metro map.