Depicting the complex networks of the human body in schematic form makes a lot of sense, and designers have been doing it for a while – as the first diagram above shows. Originally created by German medical illustrator Eduard Weber c. 1960, it’s one of a series of six schematic diagrams that depict the neurovascular systems of the human body. These diagrams are widely regarded as a iconic piece of medical design, and even newer editions of the six-sheet book can command high prices (249 euro for a used copy on German Amazon!).
The transit map metaphor is made explicit in the second diagram, “Underskin” by Dutch designer Sam Lohman. Drawing heavily on the iconography of the London Underground, if not necessarily H.C. Beck’s rigid 45-degree angle topology, the diagram ambitiously attempts to represent eight separate body sytems. I do note that newer versions of this diagram have abandoned the use of the “Tube roundel” logo… I wonder if TfL had a say in that?
Finally, we have Occipital Design’s “Arterial Schematic” from 2012, which concentrates solely on one half of the cardiovascular system, the arterial system (Arteries carry blood that is pumped away from the heart, while veins return blood to the heart). “Zones” divide the schematic up into separate body regions. The designer, Luke Farmery, makes Beck’s influence on his diagram clear on his project page. For mine, this piece is actually an effective use of the transit map metaphor, which does get abused horribly a lot of the time. It’s designed as a simplified learning aid for medical students – just as Eduard Weber’s diagram was some 50-odd years previously – and in that respect, I think it works well.
I’m in Boston regularly for business, and find myself on the T often. Downloaded the EmbarkBOS app. It has a particularly good rendering of the MBTA system. I particularly like the way they capture the several commuter rail lines out of South and North Stations in varying shades of purple.
You’ve probably seen it, but if not, here’s an image screen-capped from my phone.
Transit Maps says:
Actually, I hadn’t seen this map before (having no need of a Boston map app here in Portland, OR) , so thanks to Guy for sending it along!
Guy is right: this is a very solid representation of the MBTA “T” and commuter rail services in the one map. However, there’s one glaring error in the screenshot that Guy sent: the new Assembly station on the Orange Line (opened August 2014) is not shown. Either Guy needs to update his app to a newer version, or Embark needs to add it to their map!
A couple of minor things on the Framingham/Worcester commuter rail line: it’s not immediately obvious how the line passes through Back Bay station, as the abrupt change in direction is hidden behind the Orange Line. Also, the little jog in the line at Yawkey to separate the commuter station from the Green Line is a little awkward-looking.
The map does a pretty good job at naming all the Green Line stations, although it’s always a shame to not see the Chestnut Hill/Cleveland Circle/Reservoir station triplet in close proximity to each other. As it stands, Cleveland Circle looks like it’s quite near to Riverside, which is much, much further out in real life. However, it’s a diagram, not a map – so I can’t quibble too much about these things!
I do like the addition of airport codes to the map, which add some extra information to the map without being too visually overpowering.
Our rating: A solid combined rapid transit/commuter rail map with a couple of minor quirks. Three stars.
I’ve been working on a variation of a time-scaled transit map (more of a diagram, given there’s no geographic context). I’m not quite sure how to handle the transfer stations. I’d like to make it clear how long passengers will spend in the stations (walking, waiting) vs. how long they will be on the trains. I’d be interested in what you think.
Transit Maps says:
I really like the concept behind this, but I do think there’s a lot of work that can be done to make this diagram visually more appealing and easier to understand. Some thoughts:
Put the numbers for the time legend to both the left and right of the map. Leave enough room that they can run from top o bottom without being interrupted – the way that the numbers for 0-10 minutes are in the middle of the diagram and all the others are off to the right is confusing.
Try and use evenly-spaced column widths between the different route lines, and – as much as possible – try to put all the station names to the same side of the route. There’s some places where labels clash, and it looks a bit ugly.
I’d really like to see a visual differentiation between time spent within a station waiting for another train to arrive and time spent walking between stations. According to the official map, there’s a bit of a hike between Tsim Sha Tsui and East Sha Tsui stations via pedestrian tunnels, so it’d be nice to see that represented. Similarly, the transfer between Central and Hong Kong stations could be represented like this as well. The balloon-like expansion of the interchange symbols to denote dwell time isn’t all that attractive, but I can’t think of a better solution off the top of my head.
The blue Island Line passes through Central station, so I wonder if it might be better to represent it as such, with the shorter section to Kennedy Town continuing above the station marker for Central (with an additional time legend for it), rather than having one part of it to the left of the diagram and the other way off to the right. It just seems a little disjointed.
The complexity of the system also breaks up some of the other lines into separate sections, depending on whether or not it’s time-efficient to reach various stations via a particular route. While unavoidable in the context of the diagram, it does add to the visually fractured nature of the piece.
If you haven’t seen them, Peter Dunn’s excellent time-scaled maps of the Boston MBTA and commuter rail systems are good resources, although the “hub and spoke” nature of those systems makes the task of time-scaling much easier. I think the basis of this diagram is sound, but needs some more work to really make it shine.
(P.S. Doesn’t the Airport Express stop at Kowloon and Tsing Yi?)
Melbourne had several different transport networks operating in that era – there was the cable tram system in the inner parts of the city, and the electric trams fanning out into the new suburbs (owned by a mix of city councils and private companies). The Victorian Railways also operated a reasonable (steam-hauled) suburban service. A small number of petrol and horse buses also operated in local areas.
I figured the best way to show what travel in the era was like would be through a historically accurate map designed with modern and familiar conventions, but also reflecting the design trends of the era.
While several books about the cable and electric tram networks have included published track maps, these were in turn generated from the old Osboldstone, Sands & McDougall, and Mullens maps of the era. But these only showed the tracks, not the specific routes that operated – certainly not with individual route lines. The routes were often described on the reverse of these maps, along with fare and timetable information.
Leaning heavily on the current Public Transport Victoria/Yarra Trams map symbology for the Melbourne Tram Network, and using a geographic map of the era as a base I plotted out each specific route, using this particular combination of geographically accurate with modern symbology (given at the time the diagrammatic style was not yet widely used).
However, finding out what the specific routes were and their numbers/identifiers was actually quite difficult; the books I used as reference were often not specific enough! I had particular difficulty with finding the routes of the Prahran and Malvern Tramways Trust in the south-eastern suburbs. In a cruel twist once I had completed the first substantive version of the map, I discovered a copy of the Osboldstone pocket rail and tram map (c. 1916) in our museum archives that listed each of the routes and the streets they travelled in. Luckily all of my long-hand research turned out to be correct…
Colours and Symbology
I selected colours for the Cable Tram route lines from the colours that the trams themselves were painted in; when the system was first built in the 1880s a large chunk of the population was illiterate, so they could not read signage. To remedy this, the Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus Company (MTOC) provided fixed destination information and painted the trams in distinctive colours for each route, also displaying a lamp of that colour at night (these colours were repeated on different city streets). At the time, the cable grip+trailer sets only operated on specific routes, and so did not require changeable destination signs.
Electric trams used a mix of movable destination blinds, route numbers/letters, and coloured lights dependent on the operator. A great example is the lines of the Hawthorn Tramways Trust (HTT) which operated from Princes Bridge along Swan St to Camberwell, Norwood (Burwood), and Wattle Park. For these route lines I used the coloured light combination that would be shown corresponding to the destination; I also used the same for the routes of the PMTT (solid colour route lines were routes that used two lamps of the same colour). Curiously the Melbourne, Brunswick, and Coburg Tramways Trust (MBCTT) used a Sydney-style system of coloured shapes with destination text; I used the colours of these for the route lines along Lygon Street.
I believe this is the first time that all of the actual tram routes that operated in WW1-era Melbourne have been plotted together on the same diagram.
Fascinating Observations
The PMTT services using Glenferrie Road Malvern as a key corridor, and how far the network had expanded into the eastern and south-eastern Suburbs
St Kilda being a very popular destination and the utility of the services to Esplanade from the suburbs. Apparently these were very popular on Sundays.
Through-routing of cable services through the city
Use of Lonsdale Street in both directions for Cable services
The number and pattern of routes operated by the Hawthorn Tramways Trust. This was the only electric network to run into the CBD from its inception
The location of the Cable/Electric tram system interchange points and the routes that served these
What I would do differently in the next version
Cable routes shown as two parallel lines of the same colour with a small gap between, rather than a solid line – to differentiate them from the electric lines, also to serve as an allegory for the cable slot distinct to these tracks;
In the central city area, showing the cable route lines intersecting with some going “over” or “under” those they intersect; determined by the arrangement of the physical cables at those intersections. For example, at Collins and Swanston Street the moving cables for the Collins Street trams went over the top of the cables in Swanston Street, because of the incline immediately east of the intersection in Collins Street. The gripmen driving the cable tram services in Swanston Street would have to “throw” the cable out of the jaws of the grip and coast through these intersections, picking up the cable on the other side of the intersection.
The legend
Printed copies of this map in A2 size are currently available through our gift shop, and will shortly be available through our new online store. We’re a non-profit organisation run entirely by volunteers – all proceeds come back to furthering our preservation and curation of Melbourne’s fascinating tramway history.
Phew! There’s not a lot more to say after Adam’s extensive rundown of this fantastic project. I love a well-researched, nicely drawn map, and this one ticks all those boxes for me. There’s enough visual cues taken from the official modern-day map for this map to look familiar to Melburnians, but it also has a life of its own. I love the deep brown colour at the top of the map with the operating companies’ logos reversed out of it, and there’s lots of interesting information at the bottom, too. Attractive and educational!
I agree with Adam’s “next version” suggestions: the stroked line for the cable car lines makes a lot of sense, both visually and metaphorically and it would be fun to see exactly how those cables crossed each other. As with the cable cars in San Francisco, those gripmen must have been incredibly strong and vigilant to ensure their grip jaws never entangled in a cable that crossed their route!
The legend could perhaps use some extra detail about the routes and operators, but not at the cost of reducing the informational text next to it: it’s a fine balancing act. For the most part, the text on the map itself does a good job of explaining which company operates which route, so it’s not a big deal in my eyes.
Overall, I think this is a great project with immense historical interest, and it looks great, too!
That’s the engineering consultants’ version; I designed a nicer map on commission for the mayor’s office — with significantly more detail, based on the individual line plans — which you can see here. The city’s transportation site still uses the consultants’ version, but their advocacy site uses my redesign. (For some reason, though, they decided to crop the full map on that site, which is why I posted the full PDF separately.)
Alternatively, if you want to see the more detailed version of the consultants’ map, it’s on page 4 of this PDF (with the simplistic version you already posted on page 1):
It’s odd, and certainly confusing, that the city offers so many versions of the same thing, but my understanding is that the nice version is used primarily for in-person advocacy between the mayor and other orders of government. That strategy has been pretty effective; Mayor Iveson was elected in Oct 2013, and by March 2014, the federal government and the province both committed to fund the SE line.
(I meant to send the new map to you when we unveiled it last year, but there’s one small design change I’ve been experimenting with and haven’t had time to finish. Oh well!)
Transit Maps says:
Well, Dan’s map is certainly an improvement over the map I featured yesterday! It’s bright, colourful and easy to understand – great for the advocacy role it performs.
I personally find the convoluted path the North Saskatchewan River takes across the map a bit visually distracting (even though it is a pretty good representation of the river’s actual meandering path) and would have simplified or rounded/smoothed it out a bit, just to make it a bit softer.
The placement of the Jasper Place and Meadowlark stations within their respective 90-degree angle changes is a little unattractive – they could just be nudged up/down a tiny amount to sit in the vertical sections of their routes, I think.
Overall, however, I think this is an attractive and successful future network map: clean and clear, but not overly detailed. Nice work, Dan!
I live in Calgary, so I’m familiar with Calgary Transit’s “Route Ahead” plan to expand light rail and bus rapid transit services. Out of curiosity I searched for Edmonton Transit’s plan and found this terrible map of their light rail development plan. What is going on?!
Transit Maps says:
At first I thought this was just yet another poorly drawn, generic “future corridors” map and was wondering what the fuss was about… and then I looked at the PDF on my iPhone (second image above).
Whoops! Suddenly, I could see all the working layers from the original Illustrator file as well. Even though those layers were turned off before the export to PDF, they are still visible when viewed on some mobile devices (the layer settings in the PDF aren’t being honoured by the PDF renderer on the device).
The lesson here: always clean up/flatten your artwork before output, and test how it looks on as many devices as you can!
Source: City of Edmonton website (link no longer active)
Part of a promotional brochure discovered by Reddit user Globalwrath while cleaning his grandmother’s estate, here’s a fascinating look at the early pre-construction history of Metrorail.
Much of the actual current system is represented fairly well as the “Authorized Basic System” (thin black lines) and “Adopted Regional System” (thick black lines) with at-grade sections represented by pink lines instead. Station names are obviously tentative (Pooks Hill? Weapons Plant?), but the alignments are very familiar.
Of perhaps more interest are the thick dashed lines that represent future extensions. Even in 1968, a connection out to Dulles Airport was envisaged… and is only now becoming a reality some 47 years later. Other extensions deep in to Maryland and Virginia (Germantown? Brandywine?) seem far less likely to ever eventuate.
Really nice work here. What I love most is that these aren’t just neon copies of the official maps (that’s London above, not really looking like Beck’s map at all) but are the artist’s own interpretation of each system. Click on the source attribution below to go see all the other systems on the designer’s website – he’s made installations based on many cities, including Paris, New York, Tokyo and others.
Side note: shame on the so-called design websites that literally took every image of this project from Petr’s website and posted it to their own, giving readers little incentive to explore the original source of this remarkable work.
