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

June 5, 2015
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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Source: Kanalu Chock/Flickr – link no longer active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.

Official Map: St. Petersburg Metro, 2015

June 2, 2015
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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.

Source: St. Petersburg Metro official website

Unofficial Map: St. Petersburg Metro by Art Lebedev Studio

June 1, 2015
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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

Historical Map: Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, c. 1950-1953

May 28, 2015
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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

Boston MBTA Pocket Subway Map Cover, 1989

May 27, 2015
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“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.

Source: Mikey Ashworth/Flickr

Submission – Official Map: Bus Routes of Trier, Germany, 2015

May 26, 2015
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Submitted by Tobias, who says:

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.

Historical Ad: Swissair “European Rapid Transit System” Poster, c. 1980s(?)

May 22, 2015
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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!

Submission – Historical Map: 1979 New York Subway Map

May 20, 2015
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Submitted by peopleneedaplacetogo, who says:

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!