Sweet little illustration of SLC’s Sugar House District, including prominent landmarks, lots of parks, bus routes through the area and the new S-Line Streetcar!
Source: Valerie Jar’s portfolio website – link no longer active
Here’s a lovely cutaway view of Hermannplatz station, at the intersection of what is now U7 (the lower platform here, running east-west) and U8 (the platform above, running north-south).
The map also shows the pedestrian tunnels that connected the station directly with the basement of the monumental Karstadt department store, then one of the largest in the world. However – probably for reasons of clarity – the diagram places the entrance in the first basement level of the store and shows it as accessible by a bridge across the U7 tracks. In reality, the entrance was in the second (lower) basement level and crossed under the tracks via a tunnel. The Karstadt store was unfortunately blown up by the SS in 1945.
Source: berlin-hermannplatz.de
I’m kind of loving this elegantly simple two-colour Amtrak ridership map produced for an article on Fortune.com. It certainly shows the dominance of the Northeast Corridor in terms of ridership!
Cartographically speaking, I really like the unusual “perspective” projection, which – when combined with some lovely and subtle relief shading – certainly gives the impression of looking down from high above the continent. The labelling of the routes perhaps doesn’t quite live up to the excellence of the mapping, but this is still quality work.
(Although, apparently absolutely no one rode on the San Joaquins spur between Stockton and Sacramento.)
Source: Fortune.com – “Why America is Betting Big on Bullet Trains”
The McKinney Avenue Trolley in Dallas, Texas is opening its loop extension tomorrow, June 6th. Working with MATA (the non-profit operator of the trolley line), I updated the map that I donated to them to reflect this new service (see the final map here).
And – with my permission – DART is also using the artwork on pole signs along the route (shown above), presumably at the locations where where DART and the trolley interchange. Pretty exciting! If any Dallas readers are headed down for the opening festivities, I’d love to see a photo if you spot one in the wild!
Tourists visiting Europe are often advised to travel by train rather than plane or car. Trains are considered reliable, fast and relatively cheap. But as a new research project shows, there are major differences within Europe: Whereas you can travel from London to Paris in less than four hours, traveling the same distance can last more than 22 hours in eastern Europe.
A nice little series of isochrone maps showing how far you can get by rail in a day from major European cities. The infrastructure divide between western and eastern europe is shown pretty starkly… and poor old Dublin stuck on the other side of slow ferries to England! One minor quibble is that the intensity of red used for the first two units of time on the scale are very difficult to tell apart (and they represent 2 and 6 hours respectively, so that difference is quite substantial!), but the overall effectiveness of the graphics is still quite strong.
Source: Washington Post
From the “learn something new every day” files – I certainly had no idea that Honolulu had a relatively extensive electric streetcar network (6 streetcar lines plus three bus routes) way back in 1929!
Source: Kanalu Chock/Flickr – link no longer active
Submitted by Jug (who you may remember for his INAT series of standardised transit maps), who says:
Hi Cameron, 3 weeks ago you posted an article about the Luxembourg bus map (May 2015, 1 star). I was curious to see if that Gordian Knot could be disentangled and started working on it. Anyway when I succeeded and managed to understand how the system actually works I couldn’t help but redesign it altogether. You can see the map and some design process explanations on my website. I hope you will like it.
Transit Maps says:
Like it? I absolutely love it!
Jug’s reinvention of this map is nothing short of superb, and he deserves a lot of credit for taking the time to unravel the awful tangle of routes on the official map and turn it into something that both makes sense and looks beautiful.
He’s really done a fantastic job of reorganising and grouping everything so that the ridiculous number of routes along the main axis can be reduced to just five trunk routes, instead of the up to 20 seemingly random routes on the official map. This “trunk line” grouping also reduces the number of colours required to indicate all the routes, which definitely helps to create a simpler, cleaner look for the map.
The inclusion of the pentagon-shaped old city (which really does look much like that in real life) gives a nice focal point to the map, and this map certainly gives a much better sense of the city’s geography overall (although the outer edges are quite stylised and distorted). Another nice bonus is the inclusion of the rail lines that run through the city.
Stylistically, I think this map breaks free of some of the limitations of Jug’s previous INAT maps and actually reminds me greatly of this fantastic 1988 map of Amsterdam’s public transit by Hans van der Kooi.
Our rating: In just three weeks, Jug has created a map that’s not only far superior to the (admittedly terrible) original, but is also one of the nicest looking transit maps I’ve seen in quite a while. That’s no mean feat! Four-and-a-half stars!
Source: Jug’s website. I definitely recommend clicking through to look at the process work behind the creation of this map. It’s very instructive to see how Jug went about untangling and regrouping all the routes to make sense of them before redrawing the map as he wanted it to look.
Having posted Art Lebedev Studio’s impressive unofficial map of the St. Petersburg Metro, I was reminded by a few readers that I’m yet to post the actual official map. As it’s definitely interesting to compare the two, here’s the real deal.
Unfortunately, it’s a pretty tired-looking effort, with some very loosely-rendered and distorted islands in the middle of the Neva River, and some awful, dated-looking radial gradients inside station markers. The map omits any points of interest within the historic city centre (but shows the location of the Metro Museum at the eastern end of the M3 line!), limiting its usefulness for tourists unfamiliar with the city – something the Lebedev map has well and truly set its sights on improving.
I do quite like the sweeping, lazy curves that the red M1 and Purple M5 lines make through the middle of the map: if they were drawn with a little more precision, they could make a nice visual hook for the map, but the overall draughtsmanship is quite poor, unfortunately.
Our rating: Certainly usable as a basic metro map, but very uninspired. Certainly not befitting of Russia’s “second city”. Two stars.
From the studio that brought us the new official Moscow Metro map, here’s a map of the St. Petersburg Metro that they’ve developed under their own initiative – with an eye on making it the official map by the time the 2018 FIFA World Cup rolls around.
It’s got all the hallmarks of the Moscow map – great attention to detail, lovely use of colour and iconography, a useful and well-applied underlying grid (see second image above) and more. Interestingly, it seems to use 30-, 45-, and 60-degree angles, but for the most part, this works quite well: the only really awkward angle is at the interchange between the Red and Blue lines towards the southwest of the map.
I’m hoping it’s just Google Translate missing the nuances of the Russian language, but I do find the statement that the studio “invented” the interchange symbol used on this map specially for it quite ridiculous: the exact same triangular “white line connector” symbol first appeared on H.C. Beck’s London Undeground map in 1949!
Our rating: Knowing the amount of work and the number of iterations that the Moscow map went through from initial concept to final product, I’m betting that this is only the beginning of this map’s journey as well. Still, it’s a great start! Four stars!
Source: Art Lebedev Studios (in Russian): Project Page | Process Page
A great old map promoting the use of the H&M tubes (now known as PATH) for rapid access to Manhattan and beyond (Ebbets Field, Coney Island!).
Although undated at the original source of the map, it’s pretty easy to narrow it down to sometime between 1950 and 1953 due to the presence of the 3rd Avenue Elevated in Manhattan. As shown, it no longer goes to South Ferry (closed 1950), but still continues to City Hall (closed 1953). I feel sure it could be dated even more accurately by those more familiar with New York’s transit history than me.
See also: this great cutaway of the northern trans-Hudson tube’s intersection on the Jersey side of the river from 1909.
Source: Bruce R. Gilson/Pinterest
