Simple but effective interactive map from the Washington Post introducing the Silver Line, which opens for revenue service in just over a month!
Source: postgraphics/Tumblr
Interactive Map: Mapping the Silver Line
Official Map: Southeastern Rail Network, England
Southeastern’s website contains the following blurb: “Our network covers London, Kent and parts of East Sussex. With 179 stations and over 1000 miles of track, we operate one of the busiest networks in the country. We also run the UK’s only high speed trains.”
They should really add: “We also have a network map that makes it almost impossible to work out where our trains actually go.” I mean, what is actually going on here? Leaving out the networks of connecting rail companies, there are two main Southeastern networks – the magenta Metro routes (London and surrounds) and the lime green mainline routes that extend out into Kent and East Sussex – but that’s about as much as this map really tells you.
You could probably assume that most Metro services start at one of the four London terminus stations shown, but after that, it’s anyone’s guess. If I get on at Victoria, where can I actually go? What happens at the apparent Y-junctions east of Barnehurst and Slade Green? Which way do trains go and could they actually loop all the way back to London? Nothing here tells me otherwise, so that’s an assumption that could be made by a user unfamiliar with the system.
Do the mainline trains start in London as well, or do I have to catch a Metro train out to, say, Sevenoaks and change trains there? The lime green routes are only shown outside London’s perimeter, after all.
It’s all just horribly ambiguous and unclear. It’s only after poking around on the Southeastern website that I found an alternate “lines of route” interactive map that makes some sense of things. There are actually six Metro routes and five mainline routes, four of which originate from London. The fifth – the Medway Valley line – runs from Tonbridge to Strood. Try working that out from the map.
Our rating: A prime example of style over substance. The map looks cool and all, but it doesn’t actually help a user plan a trip at all. Eleven routes isn’t that many: show them all from end to end so that people can easily determine where to get on a train, where to most efficiently interchange with other services and where they can get off. It’s really not that hard, people. One star.
Source: Southeastern Rail website
Tutorial: Working with a Grid in Adobe Illustrator
Got a message in my inbox from ssjmaz, who says:
I’m new to working with Illustrator. While working with 45 degree angles and Snap to Grid on I have a hard time getting my lines (routes) to align properly, there is always a part of them that intersects with the neighbouring line.
Back when I first started making transit maps, I had this exact same problem. I’d make my grid, turn on Snap to Grid to lock all my route lines to it and start drawing my map. And then I’d realise that while lines drawn horizontally and vertically always worked perfectly, lines at 45 degrees had problems. The first one was always fine, but any subsequent parallel lines simply couldn’t conform to the grid because: mathematics.
If you’ve got a 10 point grid, then each side of a grid square is 10 points long. However, this means that the diagonal distance across the grid square has to be longer – Pythagoras’ Theorem and all that. In the case of a 10-point grid, the diagonal is 14.14 points long. Because of this, locking a second diagonal route line to the grid is just never going to work: it’s either going to be too close and overlap the first one, or too far away, leaving a gap between the two route lines. See the top image above.
So what to do? There are two basic options, shown in the second and third images above:
1. Use the Object > Path > Offset Path… command to offset your existing route line by the required size of your grid (10 points in this example). This works well, but does require some cutting of the resultant path to get the final required segment. I go into more detail about offsetting paths in this post.
2. My preferred method: draw your second diagonal path exactly over the top of the first one and then offset it using the incredibly useful Move dialog box. This is accessed by simply pressing the Return or Enter key while you have an object selected. Input the required distance (equal to your grid: 10 points here) and angle in the relevant boxes. Ignore the first two boxes: they’ll update dynamically as you enter values below, then click ‘OK’ to accept the move. Again, there’s some clean up required as you have to join your new diagonal path with its corresponding horizontal/vertical one. For reference, the angles that are most useful for transit map design are:
+45 degrees: moves up to the right
-45 degrees: moves down to the right
+135 degrees: moves up to the left
-135 degrees: moves down to the left
Note that the two points where the route lines change direction are at an angle of 22.5° from the vertical: exactly halfway between the only two options available if you lock all your paths to the grid. In short, a grid is an essential tool for laying out your diagram, but you can’t expect to be able to lock every single element to it. Knowing when you have to turn “Lock to Grid” off and place things manually is a big part of being a good map maker.
Official Map: South East Queensland Train Network, 2014
Requested by quite a few readers, this is an new version of this map that I reviewed back in March 2012. Unlike that previous map, this one does not show Brisbane’s bus lane network, concentrating solely on the rail system. In my eyes, this is a wise move, as the scale of the map (it’s some 240km – or 150 miles – from Nerang on the Gold Coast at the bottom of the map to Gympie at the top!) is really too great to allow a peaceful co-existence between the two networks.
As a result, the map has been simplified a lot and has much better coherence in general. The central part of the map, in particular, is much easier to follow. There’s also been an interesting operational change: the Cleveland line used to be indicated in purple and run through downtown and become the Doomben Line, but now it’s blue and interlines with the Shorncliffe Line instead.
While the routes are drawn better than the previous map, this version still has some of its failings: small, difficult to make out icons being the most obvious one. 23 separate fare zones seems to be bordering on the ridiculous, but I’m not convinced a zone number next to every station is the best way to indicate them in any case.
The newly drawn background that the map is placed on is – for me at least – way too detailed. Look at the myriad little islands shown off the coast at the end of the Cleveland Line, or the detailed twists and turns of the Brisbane River to the east of Indooroopilly. On a diagrammatic map like this, this is fussy and unnecessary: like the route lines themselves, keep the geography simple.
As a side note, this map was designed by Sydney company Netzplan, who were also responsible for the previous Sydney CityRail map (Sept. 2012, 3.5 stars).
Our rating: Six steps forward, five-and-a-half back. Ever so slightly better than what came before, but not enough to lift it up half a star. Still a three.
Source: Official Translink website
Photo: The Underground Map – Then and Now
A nicely executed little montage of Underground maps through the years. From left to right: what looks like the 1932 version of the F.H Stingemore map, the original 1933 H.C. Beck diagram, and a modern day Tube Map. I have to say, the Underground uniforms in the 1930s were a lot nicer than their modern counterparts!
Illustration: Walking the Paris Métro by Hwan Lee
This is just beautiful.
Artist Hwan Lee has walked (yes, walked!) to 261 Métro stations in Paris, sketching their many and varied entrances, from the spectacular Hector Guimard-designed Art Nouveau édicules at Abbesses and Porte Dauphine to the more prosaic entrances of the modern Ligne 14. The lively sketches of each entrance are arranged nicely onto a stylised Métro map, with Lee’s walking path denoted by a trail of feet all over the city. Delightful!
Source: Hwan’s Behance profile
Poster: Helping London Grow for the Future, Transport for London
London’s certainly come a long way since the Metropolitan Line first opened in 1863 with wooden carriages and steam engines. I wonder what a Victorian-era Londoner would think of this modern skyline, all soaring, glimmering, curving glass?
Source: transportforlondon/Tumblr – link no longer active
Historical Map: San Francisco BART & Buses Map, September 1977
Front cover for a 1977 map of BART and connecting bus services with some great late-1970s typography: tightly spaced Helvetica, yum! That BART icon is also pretty amazing and is just asking to be digitally recreated. However, there’s something screwy about that map, as much of BART appears to be located in or underneath the San Francisco Bay. Global warming, perhaps?
Hardly: some quick Photoshop analysis reveals that the underlying map has simply been erroneously rotated 180 degrees and flipped horizontally: that’s the San Mateo Bridge at the “top” of the Bay. Whoops!
Source: Luke O’Rourke/Flickr
Photo: Mexico City Metro Linea 3 Map… or List
About as simple and directly to-the-point as a line map can get. Really, it’s just a bulleted list, with each station’s icon serving as the bullet. Of note though, is how each icon has its own very distinct shape within the square (with a rounded corner) framework. Each is easily identifiable, even from a bit of a distance.
Source: dogseat/Flickr
Historical Map: Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board – Proposals for General Scheme, 1923
Another great planning map from almost 100 years ago. Melbourne, of course, is one city that has retained its trams over the years, rather than tearing them all out, only to eventually replace them with light rail or new trams in the modern day.
Here’s a great map that we’ve just added to our archives today. Authored by the M&MTB’s Chief Engineer T.P. Strickland in 1923 and overlaid on a Sands & McDougall map of Metropolitan Melbourne, it shows the extent of the cable tram network and the electric routes inherited by the Board four years earlier in 1919, and a slew of proposed lines as outlined in the “General Scheme for Future Tramways.” Some of these were eventually constructed, many others remain unrealised.
Most curious: the proposal for lines on the Footscray system to Sunshine and the City via Dynon Road; the original plan to join Spencer St/Clarendon St via Hanna St (now Kings Way) to Toorak Rd; a curious loop arrangement near Caulfield Station; the extensive network in the bayside suburbs of Elsternwick, Glenhuntly, and Moorabbin; and all of the connections in the inner northern suburbs of Fitzroy, Northcote, Preston, Brunswick, and Coburg.