New Adobe Illustrator “Join Tool” Aids Transit Map Design!

October 17, 2014
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When Adobe Illustrator finally introduced “Live Corners” in January of this year, I was overjoyed. They’d taken one of the most time-consuming and tedious tasks in transit mapping – generating properly nested sets of rounded corners where route lines changed direction – and turned it into something intuitive, quick and 100-percent accurate every time.

However, it didn’t solve every problem. Joining two separate paths into one (so that Live Corners could be applied to the new corner point) was still a laborious task that involved using the Scissors tool and hoping that it snapped to the paths properly, or a lot of manual pulling and pushing of endpoints until the two points aligned precisely (and it had to be precise, or you’d end up with two points very close to each other, one of which would have to be deleted before Live Corners could be used).

Despite their name, Illustrator’s Pathfinder tools actually do a lousy job with unclosed paths: only one of them –  Outline – works at all, and even then it strips all stroke attributes from the path in the process. So they’re not the answer, either.

However, the October update to Illustrator CC 2014 (version 18.1, if you’re keeping track) introduced the new “Join Tool” that hides away underneath the Pencil tool, as seen in the first picture above: and it’s simply fantastic.

Simply select the two paths you want to join, and then just lazily swipe over the bits of the paths that you want to be eliminated, as shown by the arrow in the second picture. That’s it! Because you’ve selected what you want to tool to affect, it doesn’t do anything to other paths nearby, like the cyan paths in the example shown.

As you can see in the third picture, Illustrator has instantly joined the two paths with a single point, that (in all my experiments at least) is exactly where it should be. It does also add some bezier anchors even though the paths are completely straight, which doesn’t seem to affect the subsequent application of Live Corners (picture 4). If it really bothers you or you like super-clean artwork (like me!), then you can click on the point with the Anchor Point Tool (Shift-C) to get rid of them before any further editing.

Submission – Washington, DC Metro Cross Stitch

October 16, 2014
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Submitted by ghostof-electricity, who says:

DC metro map cross stitch I made this summer. I moved away two weeks before the silver line opened so I chose to create the metro map pre-silver line, the way I remember it  🙂

Transit Maps says:

Rectilinear transit diagrams lend themselves well to cross stitch, but this is one of the neater ones I’ve seen. Nice work!

Historical Map: Railway Clearing House Junction Diagram of Buckinghamshire, 1911

October 15, 2014
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Not a true map, but what the Railway Clearing House (RCH) called a “Railway Junction Diagram”. Note that while railway lines, stations and junctions are faithfully and accurately depicted, not a single other detail is shown. That’s because these diagrams were created to assist the RCH in its primary task – the equitable apportionment of fares and receipts when trains from one railway company used the track of another.

Obviously, if a train from one company used its own track for an entire journey, the company was entitled to the full fare or fee. However, if that train had to use the track of other companies on its trip, then those companies would be entitled to a portion of the fare, usually based on pro-rated mileage. Before nationalisation of rail in Great Britain, there were many, many competing railways – both large and small – all entangled in a complex web of wholly owned and shared track.

The RCH was formed (and later enshrined by an Act of Parliament) to act as a broker between the railway companies to fairly settle any matters of trackage payment. Hence these highly accurate maps, with distances between stations and junctions marked prominently upon them to make computation of mileage easier. The measurements, by the way, are in miles and chains (a chain being 22 yards or 66 feet long: also the distance between the two sets of stumps on a cricket pitch). As befits the convoluted Imperial measurement system, the chain is also made up of 100 links or four rods, and there are 10 chains to a furlong, and 80 chains to a mile.

Via: aymerydelamaisonfort/Tumblr (no longer active)

Railway Clearing House map of Buckinghamshire, 1911. The green spur is the Brill Tramway, which became the end of the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground until its closure in 1932. The multicoloured line up to Verney Junction at the top was the other end of the Metropolitan; the red east-west line that it meets there was the Oxford to Cambridge route, known as the Varsity Line, which was shut in 1968. There are currently plans to reopen at least the western part of it, from Oxford to Bedford.

Work in Progress: McKinney Avenue Trolley Map – Current Service

October 14, 2014
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This is pretty much the finished product, I think, barring any major errors. The MATA website states that there are 38 trolley stops along the route, but I can only find 37, even after multiple “drives” along the entire route in Google Street View. 

I changed the background colour from silver to beige after doing some prints: the whole thing just looked too drab and grey once on paper. This works much better and make the whole map seem a little visually lighter.

Points of interest are taken directly from the current official MATA map, although far more accurately located. The only addition is the the historic trolley barn, which I’ve also highlighted by using the M-Line’s distinctive maroon colour. The map also usefully includes MATA’s contact information and general hours of operation. The whole map is formatted to print out perfectly on a US Letter sheet with half-inch margins all around – handy for tourists to print out and bring along for the ride!

The route line itself shows direction of travel, as well as where the route is double-tracked (down McKinney Avenue itself). I’ve made an effort to show where on the road the tracks actually are – left-running, right-running or center-running – while the little “half-circle” stop symbols indicate which side of the road riders should stand on to board the trolley. Full circle markers are reserved for those stops where the trolley physically changes direction: the turntable at Uptown, and the current southern terminus at St. Paul & Ross.

Stops are generally named after the street they are on, with the nearest cross street as the second part of the name. This only leads to one less than optimal result, when the Cole & Lemmon stop is immediately followed by Lemmon & Cole. A few exceptions to the rule are also made for stops near notable landmarks – the Dallas Museum of Art, for example.

DART light rail stations are shown, but lower in the information hierarchy than the streetcar, or even the Katy Trail (in orange), a popular and important multi-use (bike/pedestrian) path that links Uptown and Downtown. The DART line up to Cityplace/Uptown station actually runs in a tunnel underneath the freeway, but I’m not entirely sure if that’s really an important thing to show on a map like this.

I’ve also made two other versions of this map: one for when the spur along Olive Street opens (reportedly very soon), and one for the final configuration with the full loop through the Arts District. All up, I’ve probably only spent 20 hours or so on this project, and that includes drawing the base map from scratch. Once I’m finally done, I’ll be reaching out to MATA to see if they’d like to use this map in any way.

Thoughts? Errors? Can anyone tell me where the mysterious missing 38th stop is?

Work in Progress: McKinney Avenue Trolley Map, Dallas, Texas

October 11, 2014
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Thanks to Michael Champlin for inspiring this little project. I’ve been thinking of doing a more geographically-based map for a while now to break out of the routine of always doing diagrammatic transit maps, so when he sent me a link to the actual map (PDF, 5.6MB) that this heritage streetcar system in Dallas, Texas uses, I knew that something better could be done.

So here’s a work-in-progress screenshot. Most of the hard work has been done, but I’m still toying with a few elements here and there and adding the final informational layers on top. I drew the street map by hand in Illustrator, which is time consuming but rewarding. I did actually try to export the streets, parks and rivers from ArcGIS to style up in Illustrator, but got incredibly frustrated with the poor quality of linework from the City of Dallas’ GIS files: wonky curves, non-joined road segments, etc. It’d take me longer to clean that up than just draw it myself, so that’s what I did. At least I know what I’m ending up with when I do it myself!

The main experiment here – that I think is working well – is the bounding box around the two separate northbound and southbound stops along McKinney Avenue that share the same cross street (and therefore the name of the stop). This means I only have to label the stops once!

Other notes: the background grid is in quarter-mile increments, and the typeface is Good Headline Pro, which has a nice old world “Gothic” feel, but with a bit of a modern twist. Also: huge x-height and tiny descenders, which are great for this type of labelling work. The orange line is the Katy Trail, a popular multi-use path that’s an important part of the urban fabric of this part of Dallas.

Thoughts and suggestions?

Historical Map: 3D Visualization of Streetcar Passenger Numbers, Frankfurt, 1913

October 7, 2014
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Delightful three-dimensional representation of daily passenger numbers on Frankfurt’s streetcar lines in the early 20th century. Each strip of wood represents 4,000 passengers: the higher the wood, the more passengers on that section of line!

The figure is from Willard C. Brinton’s Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts, first published in 1914 and widely regarded as the first book on data visualization best practices. You can read the book on archive.org

Source: 100yrsofbrinton

Photo: Giant Tube Map Wall at Transport for London’s Offices

October 6, 2014
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I have to admit that I’m pretty jealous of this floor-to-ceiling Tube Map in TfL’s spiffy digs. It’s also magnetic and dry-erase marker proof.

Source: david_cunningham/Flickr

Interactive Map: Architectural Types of the Washington DC Metro

October 6, 2014
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An interesting post over at Greater Greater Washington by long-time Transit Maps contributor Matt’ Johnson: a clickable interactive map that displays the location of each of the different architectural styles at stations. (That’s eleven defined styles, plus a category for those few stations that are unique). The “waffle” vaulting at underground stations may be the iconic style in most people’s minds, but there’s definitely more to be seen than just that! Even the map above gives a great idea of how the architecture evolved (for reasons of both cost and changing architectural tastes) as the system has expanded over the years: a unified central core of the original “waffle” style, with increasing diversity out along the (newer) branch lines. Matt’ promises an animated chronological map tomorrow, which sounds excellent.

Source: Greater Greater Washington

Unofficial Map: MetrôRio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil by Pedro Guedes

October 5, 2014
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Submitted by Pedro, who says:

This is an unofficial map for MetrôRio, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I find the official map hideous (May 2012, 2 stars), so I made this one. I haven’t yet ridden this subway, so I based my map on the maps I could find online. Because lines are hard to be distinguished if you are color blind, I have decided to put the line number on their last stations. I know that colors for the Metrô na Superfície subway bus are too close to be told apart, but I have decided to keep the original colors anyway.

I have also chosen to decrease geographic accuracy in order to make the map easier to read. The older map seemed geographic accurate, but it wasn’t that perfect: Pres. Vargas station was shown as almost on the bay, when it actually is just as far as Uruguaiana or Carioca stations.

I designed Line 1 as an open circle because I have found that it is planned to be a circular route when the system is better developed. Whether those plans are still real or they have changed, I can’t assure you, but as far as I have seen, those are the most recent ones.

I also plan on redesigning the map for the subway and commuter rail system in São Paulo, but that’ll take longer as it’s much more complex.

Transit Maps says:

This is a really nice effort from Pedro, with a lot of sound reasoning behind most of his design choices. I especially like the circular shape he’s used for Line 1 – the “design hook” that I often like to see in a diagrammatic map. I do think he could have taken this thought a little further by making the top part of Line 2 a long, curving arc instead of a straight line, but this is a good start!

The rest of my comments really have to do with visual balance and informational hierarchy – I find some elements too large (the legend box and the name of the bay, which isn’t really a hugely important piece of information in the context of a transit map) and others too small (the names of the stops on the Metrô na Superfície bus routes). I also feel that the green “Todas (all)” text box at Central station could be placed above the station label: this would allow the “Pres. Vargas” label to be placed outside the circle like all the other stations around the right half of the ring. The placement of the “Cantaglo” label is a little trickier, but perhaps the whole map could be moved upwards to help accommodate it outside the ring. Note that there’s a lot of empty space above the map, while the bottom is jammed up hard against the edge of the page.

Our rating: Better than the official map and with a lot of good ideas. Needs just a little tweaking to make it really good. Three stars.

Historical Map: SCRTD Tourist Bus Pass Brochure Map, 1980

October 3, 2014
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When is a bus map not a bus map? When it doesn’t really show any routes at all, that’s when. While this cheerfully cartoonish map might show destinations and label some major roads with bus route numbers, I think that anyone – let alone tourists new to LA! – would find it very difficult to actually navigate their way anywhere using only this map. It just about works as an introduction to the region and the bargain tourist pass rates ($1 per day for unlimited bus rides – sweet!), but that’s about it.

Source: Metro Transportation Library and Archive/Flickr