More proof of just how ingrained the Tube Map is in the English psyche is evident in this billboard advertisement for Double Diamond beer – inserted as the punchline in the long-running “Only here for the beer!” campaign.
The ad campaign itself is almost as much as part of England as the Tube Map; the tag line has entered into the vernacular, much like “Where’s the beef?” in the U.S., and “Not happy, Jan!” in Australia.
Source: Jay Brooks/Flickr
Dating back to the construction of the Kaohsiung MRT back in 2005. The O5/R10 interchange is now the Formosa Boulevard station, widely regarded as one of the most beautiful metro stations in the world.
I’m not even going to pretend that I understand what the colour-coded gophers are for, but they sure are cute!
Source: ailb/Flickr – link no longer active
A look at another stalled attempt to get rapid transit up and running in Seattle, this time from 1970. A lot of the proposed alignments look very familiar, but they are often constrained by Seattle’s difficult geography. I see that they were thinking of running rapid transit over the I-90 floating bridge – quite the engineering feat even now, let alone over 40 years ago. Even now, it’ll be the first light rail track travelling across a floating bridge in the world when built.
A beautiful illustration style, though, with a restrained but useful three-colour palette (black, cyan and orange). I wish there were more planning maps like this these days.
Source: SounderBruce/Flickr
Welcome to FCB Island! Or something like that… I’d love to have listened in on the design brief for this project:
Make it an island!
Yeah, an island that looks like our crest!
With lots of subway lines going everywhere and converging at the stadium! But none of them will go to the airport! Ha ha! Hilarious!
I know, make the subway lines spell out “FCB” in the middle!!! Great!
And it’s gotta have ALL the players’ names!!!
This is going to be AWESOME!!!!!
Submitted by scnartup, who says:
Similar stuff to the video of a day in the life of London’s Underground in Budapest. Metro line M4 is not shown since it opened in 2014 and the video was made in 2012. One dot represents one vehicle [as opposed to the London video, where 1 dot represents a single rider – CAM].
Legend:
Transit Maps says:
Again, simply mesmerising stuff here. I love how the “skeleton” of the transit network is formed as the peak period hits, but my favourite part is when the first commuter trains trundle in from the edge of the map early in the morning as the night buses start to disappear off the map.
Submitted by Mikko, who says:
Helsinki Regional Transport Authority’s (HSL) draft map of rapid transit and trunk bus lines, published for comments on 16 February 2015. There are multiple errors and readability problems with this version, e.g. the commuter train designation letters are too small to be read, some Swedish-language names are wrong etc. Some notes:
Also submitted by Chris Helenius, who adds:
HSL/HRT… drafted a map for the planned trunk lines by year 2020, which combines commuter rail, the subway, and buses. I guess it’s a growing trend to mash together all the transit modes you’ve got, when your own maps start to seem empty and inferior to those of metropolises. The bus line is colored the same as the subway, because they want to brand the bus line as “subway-like”.
Transit Maps says:
If you were wondering how Helsinki’s new heart-shaped commuter rail line might look on an actual transit map, this draft map of future transit extensions gives at least some idea. It combines the commuter rail (thick purple lines), the Metro (thick orange lines) and select bus routes (thinner orange lines).
Sadly, the heart shape isn’t present in this version of the map, which opts for a stolid rectilinear representation of the new route. Mikko is absolutely right – the letter designations for the commuter rail routes are way too small to be useful, although (Swedish naming errors excepted) the need for the map to be bilingual is handled fairly deftly.
To be honest, I really wish the bus routes were depicted in a different colour, although I see that the buses themselves have an orange livery that echoes that of the Metro’s trainsets. I’m personally not convinced that buses – no matter how “BRT-like” they are – are directly comparable to metro/subway service, but that doesn’t stop transit agencies from trying to tell us that they are!
As for “mashing together” all the transit modes (as Chris so eloquently puts it), this isn’t something I have a problem with – so long as it’s done well. This is a bit of a half-hearted effort, being as it’s really only a draft planning map to show future extensions to the current system rather than a proper in-use-by-the-public transit map.
Our rating: A tantalising look at the future, but not a finished product by any means. Two stars.
Source: HSL’s website (in Finnish only)
Disclaimer: this was produced for April Fools Day and is not an actual product in the “Highways of the USA” print series.
Pretty much as soon as I finished my monumental Highways of the United States project last year, people started asking me why I hadn’t included the two non-contiguous states of Alaska and Hawaii, both of which do actually contain federal highways in one form or another.
To be honest, after finishing the giant map of the lower 48 states and then splitting that up into all the maps of the different states and regions, I was pretty much exhausted and needed a break from the project. After two years of intensive research and design, can you blame me? Fast-forward to almost a year later, and I finally feel that I can revisit those requests for the two “missing” states. After a lot of thought, I’ve decided against doing Alaska, as my maps only show existing signed routes. While the Alaskan “A” Interstates exist on paper and in funding budgets, there’s not a single Interstate shield to be found along the highways of that state. Also, Alaska is freaking huge, and there’s no way I’m drawing/simplifying all that crinkly coastline!
Hawaii is a different matter, however, as its “H” Interstates – all on the island of O’ahu – are very definitely signed. There are three “major” highways: H-1 through H-3, and one three-digit loop highway, H-201. The major highways don’t follow the same odd/even numbering conventions of mainland Interstates, but are just numbered in the order that they were funded and constructed. Together, the four highways total just 55.4 miles (89 kilometres) in length, but feature some impressive (and expensive) engineering, especially along Interstate H-3.
And for all you people asking how the heck Hawaii can have Interstate highways when they clearly don’t travel interstate, hush. In this instance, “Interstate” refers to the method of federal funding and the minimum standards that the highway must adhere to. There are plenty of intrastate Interstate highways on the mainland: I-97 in Maryland is actually wholly contained within one county. More information on Hawaii’s Interstates here on the FHWA’s website.
The map uses the same design conventions and is drawn at the same scale as my other Highways of the United States maps, although I’ve introduced some appropriately tropical colours for each of the highways. To give a proper sense of scale, I’ve included the entire Hawaiian archipelago.
Submitted by Augustin, who says:
A new ring rail line is soon to be opened in Helsinki, thus providing a convenient way to reach the airport from city centre (only bus services are available as of now). HSL, the local transportation authority, advertises this huge change with a lovely heart shaped map of the ring, conveniently showing all the stops the trains will potentially call at, although the actual stopping pattern on the line has yet to be decided. (If there are too much stops to the airport, the train will not do better than bus, which takes 30 minutes and leaves every 10 minute from Helsinki train station bus centre. My guess is that there will be omnibus services on both ways, and expresses services to the airport using the shorter I way.)
The geographically accurate map shows that, indeed, the completed ring will be pretty much heart shaped. The stylized version does a good enough job for advertising purposes, even showing the transfers to other transportation means, and the transversal high frequency buses (orange lines, known as “Jokerit”). We’ll see how it’s included in the global maps. The letters P and I by which the two services are to be known (viz. clockwise and counterclockwise) refer, I guess, to Pohjoinen (Nothern, as the section from Helsinki to Vantaankoski is on the main railway that serves central and northern Finland), and Itäinen (Eastern, because of the section between Helsinki and Tikkurila.)
Opening is due in early July, but Helsinkians already surely love it! (The completion of that project has been long awaited…)
Transit Maps says:
The map is actually quite adorable, and works really nicely within the context of introducing the new rail service to the public. I note that HSL’s home page uses a heart-shaped icon to represent the new service, so this is definitely part of an overall branding effort.
As for how the new line will fit into upcoming maps, I’ve got some more submissions in the pipeline that give us some idea of that. Stay tuned!
Source: project page on HSL’s website
David, who runs The Greater Marin blog, has created this absolutely superb modern transit diagram version of rail services in the Bay Area in 1937. He’s used a contemporaneous railway timetable as his main source of information, so it seem to be pretty accurate, although he’s still seeking final feedback about the map’s content before finishing the project up.
Stylistically, the map quite obviously borrows from Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map, complete with black station dots. The addition of hollow “sometimes stops” dots somewhat dilutes Vignelli’s “no dot, no stop” mantra, but helpfully adds another layer of information. The use of the superbly legible Fira Sans typeface also helps to give the map a slightly friendlier, less minimalist look.
While the modern iteration of Vignelli’s subway map groups and colour-codes route lines by their common trunk line, this map color-codes them instead by the operating railroad company. This works wonderfully well and instantly shows how the routes were divided up geographically between all the competing companies. It’s interesting to note that the map appears to indicate that many trains terminate in San Francisco at Market Street (Image 2 above), which isn’t quite true. While the Bay Bridge had opened in 1936, rail service across its lower deck to the Transbay Terminal didn’t start until 1939. At this time, ferries – often scheduled to coincide with the arrival and departure of trains – crossed from the Ferry Building to gigantic railway wharves on the eastern side of the Bay. David mentions the ferry services in the legend to the map, but some visual indication that the journey requires a change of transportation mode at the wharves could be nice. Perhaps just a white square behind the black dots to indicate the “break” would work?
The use of thin lines to indicate services that only had one train a day works nicely, but it can lead to a bit of visual clutter when other route lines pass underneath the thinner lines. Look at the third image above and observe how the teal Atcheson, Topeka & Santa Fe (ATSF) route line passes underneath all of the other route lines it comes across. Where it meets a combination of thick and thin lines, there’s a little gap left between them that the ATSF line peeks through. Depending on the combination of thick and thin route lines, these gaps can appear in varying widths, so the overall effect can be a little messy.
In situations like this, I prefer to place the single route above the wider, multiple-track routes. I think it looks cleaner, and it also makes that single track easier to follow along its entire path. David’s actually already done this in a couple of places, and the difference is obvious to me – see the last image above, where the red D6 route drops south-east out of Tracy above the purple and yellow lines that it crosses. Much better!
Very minor things: I personally think the route designation discs could be a bit larger in relation to the label type to make them easier to read from a distance, and it also looks like some of the black station dots are not quite centred on their route line (see the main San Francisco – Market Street station, where they’re all slightly too far above and to the right of the routes). I’m also not crazy about the way some text in the legend encroaches into the gutter between the columns, but I can see that there’s limited space there for a lot of information!
Our rating: Painstakingly researched and beautifully realised: this is my kind of transit map! Four stars. David hopes to have prints of this map available by April 15 on his blog, so keep an eye out if you’d like a copy!
Source: via David’s Twitter (link to PDF)
Great photo of a old and weather-worn Tube Map, taken at White City tube station. If you look closely, you can see that more than one layer of map is visible in certain sections, giving sort of an archaeological cross-section of different eras (See the doubled-up interchange station symbols at Euston for a good example). The most visible map seems to date from the early 1970s as it shows the Highbury branch of the Northern Line towards the upper right of the photo, soon to be transferred to British Rail.
Source: jayay/Flickr
