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!
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.
“The ‘T’: One of Boston’s Last Great Bargains” proclaims this neat little pop-arty pocket map cover. Five of the six colours used in the design make sense (representing the four lines of the “T” plus purple for commuter rail), but what’s the yellow for? Making up the numbers in the days before the Silver Line, it seems.
EDIT: My readers are awesome! Thanks to those who have pointed out that yellow was (and still kind of is) used to represent buses in the MBTA network, which explains its appearance here rather nicely.
Trier’s not a big town (100,000 population), but it’s Germany’s oldest. Therefore many tourists are coming to visit and see the Roman buildings and ruins. I don’t know if they use the bus for that. See the plan attached.
Transit Maps says:
If Trier is like many other German towns that I’ve visited (and a quick look at Google Maps seems to confirm that it is), then the tourist-frequented historical core is very small and easily walkable, so I’d probably say that bus usage by visitors to the city is limited. For example, it’s just 500 metres (0.3 miles) from the Hauptbahnhof to the famous Porta Nigra and only about a kilometre until you reach the bank of the Moselle River. (Wisely, the map includes the river, which helps immensely with basic orientation.)
Stylewise, this is a pretty typical German-style transit map, although with one idiosyncrasy that can make following routes a little difficult. Complex stops are rendered as hollow “J” or “C” shapes, with a gap in the middle – the stop’s label is often pushed into this gap to save a little bit of space. This can make it a little tricky to follow a route through the station and out the other side, as many route lines don’t maintain the same relative position on either side of the station. It’s not terrible, but it can create a little momentary confusion.
Like many diagrammatic maps the scale is flexible, with a vastly expanded city centre and compressed outer edges. The diamond in the middle of the map is roughly 500-600 metres along each side, while the farflung town of Morscheid at the bottom right of the map is some 18 kilometres (11 miles) by road from the Hauptbahnhof. I do like the way that the blue district/suburb/town names are applied directly to a stop if there’s only that one stop within that region: it prevents duplication of labels rather nicely.
Our rating: A little tricky to follow routes in complex parts of the map. Not outstanding, but pretty decent. Two-and-a-half stars.
Sent my way by long-time correspondent, Kyril Negoda. I’m not entirely sure of the vintage of this, as the archive it resides in covers the entire period from 1980–2000, and none of the images have dates attached to them. There’s definitely an early 1980s vibe to it, though – mainly from the tightly kerned Futura Bold heading at the top.
I’ve seen transit map-styled airline maps before (here and here, for example), but this one stands out as being particularly attractive and boldly designed, as an advertising poster should be!
This, from 1979, is the first published version of the now-familiar Michael Hertz Associates-designed New York Subway map, which replaced the (in)famous diagrammatic Vignelli map of the early 1970s. While most of the design decisions are still reflected in the subway map today, it’s interesting to see what’s changed over the intervening 35 years. The 1979 map is somewhat less geographically distorted, the distinction between express and local services is drawn slightly differently (with coloured tickmarks for local and coloured circles for express, even at stations where only “express” trains stop), and since most subway-bus transfers were not free back then, the few bus routes that did offer free transfer are shown prominently (these were mostly bus routes that had replaced previously-existing subway services, in some cases 60+ years before this map was published).
Transit Maps says:
It’s funny how we call this the “same” map as today’s version, because there’s a lot of differences, both big and small. The Beck-style tick marks for local stations as mentioned above, no Staten Island inset, the biggest legend box I’ve ever seen, the colours used for water and parkland… the list goes on!
And it’s not just visual either, as the production methods have changed from laborious hand-crafted cartography (Lightboxes! Rubylith! Scalpels!) to modern digital techniques and software. Converting this map to a digital format for the first time must have been fun!
Awesome little “8-bit” video from the MTA explaining how headways are affected by service delays and the steps that can be taken to mitigate those delays. Great old-school soundtrack as a bonus – turn it up!
This map I created presents the NSW rural rail passenger network at its maximum extent in the CityRail style. The stations and lines that no longer provide passenger service (or have been disused completely) are greyed out – with the vast majority of stations and lines now falling into this category.
Transit Maps says:
This is great work, simultaneously showing NSW’s rail network as it currently exists (solid colours, black station names), and as it once did (ghosted colours, grey names). While the creator says the map is in the “CityRail style”, it actually mimics the previous CityRail map (September 2012, 3.5 stars), not the current “T-numbered” Sydney Trains map. However, it uses the red (northern), yellow (western) and green (southern) colours of that map very effectively, also adding purple for lines that don’t reach Sydney from Victoria. The inset for Sydney also works very nicely and reveals some long-lost branch lines and stations (Cream of Tartar station, anyone?)
For me, there’s a little too much distortion in the overall shape of the state, especially down on the Victorian border near the ocean, but it’s not a deal breaker in any way.
What I’d really, really like to see on a zoomable map like this is dates of opening and closure for both entire lines and individual stations. That would make this map an even more compelling piece of information visualisation than it is now.
Our rating: Great fun to scroll around the zoomable map (website no longer active, unfortunately). Three-and-a-half stars!
While I’ve been designing imaginary transit maps, and re-imagining existing transit maps, for a few years, I’ve been doing it on Illustrator. I’ve drawn the Welsh rail franchise a number of times, but I set myself a few challenges this time round.
I wanted to make it clearly bilingual. Here in Wales we’re used to seeking out our respective languages on signs and official documents, but official versions of the map often use a coloured, and slightly lighter shade for the Welsh variants. There is some merit in this when you are trying to squeeze everything into a cramped layout, but if you space your information correctly I see no reason why this should be necessary.
Unlike my previous versions, I wanted to be able to give a clear indication of the normal routes that trains take. There are clear flows. In the Cardiff area, trains from Merthyr go to Barry, trains from Rhymney go to Penarth. At Wrexham General the hourly service to Holyhead comes from Birmingham and Cardiff on alternate hours, and so on. Adding in lines has forced each individual stroke to go smaller. I have used a ‘white blob’ indicator for station stops.
I wanted the map to be clearly legible when printed as small as A3. For the vast majority of type I employed the DIN Condensed typeface. It renders clearly but gives enough room for the bilingual text. The only place where I failed to keep this at 8pt type was at Energlyn, a new station on the Rhymney line which already has a great many stops. I’ve tried to handle it elegantly, though I doubt everyone will be convinced!
Finally, and to explain my first paragraph, I wanted to use this map to try out Affinity Designer. I’ve been fairly impressed: this could emerge as a serious contender to Illustrator in time. It has most of the basic tools already, and although the interface can be clunky at times and some tools definitely need work, it has very capably produced a result which could definitely rival the official maps.
Nonetheless this work could do with some further refinement. I’m not quite convinced by the joined white dots at major interchanges like Cardiff, the placement of which I have played around with many times. DIN Alternate is also not the most beautiful typeface for the large fonts, though it does resonate clearly with DIN Condensed.
I’d be grateful for an overall critique, and any positive suggestions regarding improvements.
NB. The original output is obviously a PDF with a nominal page size of A3, but I have rendered it as a PNG for uploading. I’ve also been doing this on a Retina iMac, and it’s a pleasure to look at text and line art!
Transit Maps says:
Overall, this is a very attractive and well-conceived diagrammatic map. It is a little bit of a shame that the landscape A3 format squashes Wales vertically so much, but the neat organization of the map – with well-defined operating regions and strong visual axes – counteracts that somewhat. I especially like how the Valleys and Cardiff commuter rail lines at the bottom of the map are arrayed in a neat shape surrounding Cardiff, which are then further delineated by the “loop” line from Swansea back to Shrewsbury. The vertical compression does lead to some stations on north/south routes being placed very close to each other, which leads to some uneven-looking station spacing across the map, but everything is still nice and easy to follow.
Like James himself, I’m not entirely enamoured of the diagonal placement of the station dots at some of the major interchanges like Cardiff. It doesn’t occur often enough in the map to be a repeating design motif, so it looks a little out of place when it does show up.
The bilingual labels on a completely even footing work quite nicely across the whole map, even when James has to deal with the ridiculous Victorian folly of a name at Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch station on Anglesey (a made up name to impress tourists – I’ve been there and I wasn’t that impressed). I think his smaller type at Energlyn is a fair compromise given the space restrictions there, and is actually quite reminiscent of the “subtitle” approach to long station names that’s now used on the Washington Metro.
Apart from these comments, I’d probably also change the end of the red route line at the bottom right of the map into an arrow pointing towards London Paddington, rather than have it appear as a station apparently minutes across the Welsh border.
Our rating: A competently drawn and nicely abstracted diagrammatic map. Perhaps a little too squished from north to south as a result of paper size restrictions. Three stars.
Side note: James’ use of Affinity Designer – a newcomer to the Mac OS X vector illustration game – is definitely worthy of note. As seen from this map, it can produce excellent results, and the interface certainly seems to be more polished than the open-source Inkscape. With a price tag of just $50 for a license (not a subscription), it could be an ideal starting point for those Mac users wanting to get into transit map design, but who can’t afford Adobe Illustrator. For comparison, $50 buys you around 2.5 months of an Illustrator-only Creative Cloud subscription, or just one month of a complete CC subscription.
