Submission – NEW Official Transportation Map of Szeged, Hungary, 2015

June 14, 2015
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Submitted by barnade, who says:

Two years ago, you reviewed the transit map of Szeged, Hungary (September 2013, 0.5 stars). The conclusion was the map is a mess, as we here in Szeged thought so. Also, you’ve been pointed out that it would be much better, if a circular schematic form had been applied, based on the town’s triple-boulevard structure. Now, the day has come, the new official transit map of Szeged have been applied on trams, trolleybuses and buses, thanks to electric public transport company SZKT and the new local bus and coach provider DAKK. Besides of the foregoing circular scheme, it’s also a new thing to have every line (bus, trolleybus, tram) on a single map. There is another version of the new map, which is based on the real map of the town, with natural scale, having the main sightseeing points on it [the second image above – Cam]. This version can be found on SZKT’s website, and will be placed in the stops.

Transit Maps says:

Wow, what a difference a few years can make! This is so much better than the previous map I reviewed (which, sadly, is still hanging around on the SZKT website). The circular diagram is a natural fit for the city’s shape – as shown by a comparison with the geographical map above – and it’s implemented quite well, with a nice hierarchy from trams (thick yellow lines), through trolleybuses (thinner red/magenta lines) and down to the downtown and suburban bus lines (dark blue and light blue lines, respectively). And I love that the same style of mapping and hierarchy has been carried across between the two different maps – visual continuity that can only help the end user to understand and navigate the system.

The excellent work of the diagram itself is let down a little bit by the typography and placement of the legends, which aren’t quite up to the same standard. This is a pretty minor point, though.

Our rating: Much better! The diagram by itself is nice enough, but it’s in combination with the geographical map that the new mapping system really shines. Probably one of my favourite Eastern European maps now. Three-and-a-half stars.

Source: dakk.hu website (PDF)

Reader Question: Are there any resources available for exporting city map data to vector format for importing into Illustrator?

June 14, 2015
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Question: Are there any resources available for exporting city map data (similar to Google Maps, etc) to vector format for importing into Illustrator? Do you utilize any pre-existing data for your projects, or do you simple start from scratch? I’m thinking of your Dallas streetcar map in particular.

Answer: To be honest, most of the time, I just start from scratch. My very low-tech workflow is to quickly grab some screenshots from Google Maps or similar and just start drawing on top of it in Illustrator. I figure that if I’ve drawn it myself, I’ll get a map that does exactly what I want it to do, and I’ll set it up right so that I can edit it easily in the future. It also means that I can simplify things as I work, like straightening out roads a bit for clarity.

I actually do have a copy of ArcMap at work and I can use it well enough to find data, make and export a basic unstyled map for further editing in Illustrator, but most of the time I just end up horrified by the poor quality of paths that it creates – millions of points, unconnected line segments, and so on. Basically, clean up of these files can take longer than just drawing a simple base map myself. For an idea, it only took me 7-8 hours to draw the underlying roads, waterways and parks for the McKinney Avenue Streetcar map, and that included all the fiddly freeway interchanges!

To the other part of your question: I don’t think it’s permissible under Google Maps’ license agreement to export their data for reuse, and I’m not even sure that it’s possible to get vector output from Google Maps.

That leaves GIS (either paid ArcGIS, or freeware like QGIS – but as I say above, results can be less than impressive), or – perhaps more promisingly – exporting as SVG or PDF from OpenStreetMap.org, which has the added bonus of being completely open-source.

Their Wiki has some basic information here, and this seems to be a great walkthrough on getting quality, layered, unstyled SVG exports from OSM using a command-line utility, Maperative.

Note: Unstyled exports are important, because most of the time you want to bring an SVG into Illustrator to apply your own styling. Not having to remove or edit previously existing styles is a huge time-saver!

I hope that this at least starts you on your way! I feel sure some of my readers know far more about this subject than me, so please leave a comment if you think you can shed some more light on the topic.

Submission – Official Map: Bike Network Map of Houten, The Netherlands

June 13, 2015
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Submitted by Bertram Bourdrez, who says:

I ran into this while reading about Houten (the Netherlands), a town celebrated for its high cycling rate (about 52% of all journeys):

Translation of the first paragraph: 

“Houten is a true cycling town, but all of its red cycleways look alike. Not everyone knows how to find their way around the different neighbourhoods. To solve this problem, the town council and the local chapter of the Dutch Cyclists’ Union have created a wayfinding system, based on a transit map.”

I actually quite like the map, for the gimmick that it is. It has very few of the inexplicable inconsistencies that tend to plague transit maps made for non-transit uses. Apparently they’ve marked lampposts along each route with coloured and numbered indicators to show what “line” you’re on.

On a transit-related note, the main destinations in a Dutch sleeper town like this would definitely be the train stations, which are at the core of the network and easily reached by routes 1, 4, 6 and 7. Both stations have extensive free and guarded bike parking for easy interchange.

Transit Maps says:

First off, Houten looks like an amazing place to get around by bike – cycle paths that are largely separated from roads, a very clear differentiation between arterial and local streets, low local speed limits, and curving streets to effectively deter speeding. It all adds up to that amazing 52% bicycle journey rate that Bertram quotes above. By comparison, my city of Portland, Oregon – often held up as a leader in cycling here in the US – has a bike commute rate of just 6%.

The map itself works well for a couple of reasons. First, it doesn’t overdo the “transit map” concept, remaining true to the actual layout of the city, albeit in a nicely simplified form. Secondly, the numbered routes actually seem to cross the city in a useful, logical manner, rather than just being created in an effort to push the transit map metaphor (something I’ve seen other bike and walking maps do, overcomplicating things to make the map look more impressive).

I also quite like the logo for the network, which has a stylised bike made out of “route lines”. Its rear wheel looks like an interchange symbol from the map, and sits at the intersection of a Blue Line and a Green Line. On the map, these lines (routes 1 and 4) intersect at the main train system: the heart of the city and the network.

Our rating: Simple is better sometimes! Three stars.

Source: Municipality of Houten website

Illustration/Map: Sugar House District, Salt Lake City by Valerie Jar

June 11, 2015
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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

Historical Map: Cutaway View of Berlin’s Hermannplatz U-Bahn Station, c. 1929

June 11, 2015
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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

Visualization: Amtrak Ridership Map for Fortune.com

June 10, 2015
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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”

McKinney Avenue Trolley Loop Opens – My Map Updated!

June 5, 2015
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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!

Visualization: The remarkable distances you can travel on a European train in less than a day

June 5, 2015
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postgraphics:

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

Historical Map: City of Honolulu, Hawaii showing Streetcar and Bus Routes, 1929

June 4, 2015
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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

Submission – Unofficial Map: Bus Routes of Luxembourg City by Jug Cerovic

June 2, 2015
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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.