Ugh. A terrible JPG of a decidedly ugly map. There’s so much to dislike about this: the blocky label type; the tiny, indecipherable symbols used for the Metro and light rail in Baltimore and the insultingly poor renditions of the logos of connecting services (WMATA, Amtrak and VRE); the ridiculously ornate and garishly coloured compass rose; the soft “glow” effect applied to the MARC routes… the list goes on. Not to mention the mistakes, like the incorrect colour for the Brunswick Line on the legend and the missing “railway line” ticks on the Camden line.
Our rating: Slipshod work with an ugly result. One star.
With the recent opening of Budapest’s Metro Line 4, there’s been a rethink behind the city’s transit map. The previous version (July 2012, 2.5 stars) tried to show everything – Metro, suburban rail, regional rail, tram and key bus routes – on one map, but it was all a bit of a mess. With so many thin, colour-coded lines (using a strangely limited palette), things became very difficult to understand.
Hence this new approach, where the services are split out into separate maps. This map just shows the Metro and suburban rail services within the city (arrows point towards more distant destinations). Connections to regional rail services are simply indicated by a railway station icon. Another map (which I’ll cover later) adds bus and tram services, but takes a different approach to the previous version.
As a simple Metro map, this isn’t half bad. It’s easy to follow, and the simplified treatment of the river gives some nice geographical context, dividing the city neatly into its “Buda” and “Pest” components. The closeness of the stations on Metro Line 1 makes it look somewhat like a dashed “under construction” line – a drawback of using station symbols that are the same colour as the route line they’re on, but it seems to work well elsewhere.
I do miss the old Metro logo: it was one of my favourites from around the world. The new one is functional enough, I guess, and matches the corresponding new suburban rail “H” nicely, but it just lacks the distinctively East European character of the previous one.
Our rating: Solid, clean and clear. Not amazing, but better than some. Three stars.
Hey Cameron, I am wondering if you’d be interested in reviewing this unofficial subway map of my hometown – Beijing. The author is Lyt, aka “lighthunter”. I think his version is 100,000 times better than the official map. I think he deserves an ovation.
Although China now has the longest subway mileage in the world, most Chinese transit maps are hideous. That’s why I figure this map could be a really good addition to your blog.
Transit Maps says:
It saddens me to report that this map has been hiding way down at the bottom of my inbox for quite some time now. Quite simply put, this is gorgeous work and should have been posted a long time ago. It’s really everything you want a diagrammatic map to be: compact, simple, easy to understand, and beautiful to look at.
Future lines are shown, but pushed way down in the information hierarchy by making them all a light grey. Beijing’s multiple ring roads are also present, but only very faintly: a visual aid if you need it, barely noticeable if you don’t.
I particularly like the interesting station markers for non-interchange stations – instead of a tick or circle, a thin notch is taken out of the route line that also points towards the station’s label. Nicely done!
Our rating: By far the best Beijing Subway map that I’ve seen so far. Four-and-a-half stars!
Extremely nifty isometric “pixel art” illustration showing all the family-friendly adventures that can be had on England’s Southern Rail network. Probably not much use as an actual map, but it does name/highlight a lot of the useful stations and the activities that can be had in the region. A lot of fun to be had poring over the detailed illustration, and I love the pencilled rough for comparison.
The artist, Rod Hunt, is perhaps best known for his “Where’s Stig?” books – a kind of “Where’s Wally?*” for Top Gear fans.
Compare the rough to the final artwork – Southern Railway’s “Southern Adventure” summer advertising campaign, imagining the rail network & many of the regions tourist attractions as a theme park. Can you find Loco Toledo, the campaign’s Mexican Wrestler?
An odd little map from the Fall/Winter 1978 PATCO timetable brochure. While the Hi-Speed line itself is nicely shown in a lovely strong red, the absolute tangle of highways shown in New Jersey is somewhat bewildering, and really not that helpful.
The other bit of strangeness is the way that the map shows highways and towns all the way out to the Atlantic coast – some 45 miles past Lindenwold, the easternmost PATCO station. The map does note that you can transfer to “Seashore Buses” at Lindenwold, but doesn’t show any routes for them. Conrail trains actually ran from Lindenwold out to several coastal destinations just a few years prior, as this almost identical map from 1978 shows. Rather than completely redraw the map, PATCO just erased the tracks from the old artwork and reused it. Very pragmatic.
In 1989, the Atlantic City Line (re)opened, first with Amtrak trains, and then with the current NJ Transit commuter rail service.
Our rating: Sneakily repurposing an older map’s artwork may be thrifty, but it makes for a very off-centred, unbalanced map. Fully two-fifths of the area serves very little purpose. One-and-a-half stars.
As much as I hate to admit it, this is actually pretty darn awesome. With its 45-degree angles, it’s definitely channelling the Vignelli diagram far more than the squiggly official map.
This is my concept for what an integrated regional inter-city rail network in the Northwest could look like, if things had developed that way. All there is now (regionally) is Cascades, which I ride all the time, but it’s still rather limited. I decided to include the local commuter rail lines (WES, Sounder, WCE) too. I also decided to beef up CalTrans a bit – they don’t actually serve Redding, although it’s in discussion.
I sort of based the concept on the National Rail network in the UK, although things had to be scaled up a bit. The area shown is about 2.5 times the size of the UK, after all. I decided to include the main communities the lines pass through, rather than have a ton of whistle stops. To me that makes it feel more…functional, for lack of a better word – more like a proper, seamless system. That being said, I think the scale belies the vastness of the region, so if I were to make smaller-scale maps for individual routes, I would probably include “whistle-stop sections” along the route. But that’s TMI for an overview.
The routes are all current rail lines, in various states of freight usage or disrepair. I think the section between Juntura and Burns has been scrubbed entirely, but the grade is still there. There are several other minor infrastructure adjustments that would be needed too (downtown Hillsboro comes to mind).
As far as design goes, it seemed best to include some stylized geographical accuracy rather than have it be too rectilinear. I tried to make the route names somewhat geographic, but I also numbered them for clarity. Route 1 (CascadesExpress) I had imagined as being a high-speed line, as opposed to the more local routes 2 and 3. Together they replace Amtrak Cascades (but keep the name for continuity).
Tumblr and/or Dropbox will likely crush the resolution, but the idea is that it’s supposed to be a big map, such as you would find mounted inside a station, or as a PDF online.
I’m curious what you think of it.
Transit Maps says:
Overall, this is a fine effort, which could just use a little polishing here and there to make it a quite excellent fantasy map. A couple of areas stand out to me for potential improvements:
First, the insets at the top, right and bottom of the map – all for just a few stations each – really make it look like you just ran out of room and didn’t want to go back and rework things. There’s lots of room on a map this big to tighten things up and make everything fit without insets. Even bringing all your stations just a tiny bit closer together across the entire map can create a surprising amount of extra space. For mine, insets should only be used when the complexity of the system at that point can’t reasonably be shown any other way: the inset of the Loop on the official Chicago “L” map stands as a good example of this.
Secondly, you could work a little more on stylizing and simplifying your coastline and rivers. The San Juan Islands look particularly blocky to me, and I think the Columbia River would look so much nicer if it had sweeping curves as it changed direction, rather than the harsh angles you currently have. Remember, the style of your background should complement your route lines, not draw attention away from them.
I also think the thick black border around your legend is a little heavy handed, but that’s a very minor thing.
One thing on the operational aspect of your system (which I don’t normally comment on too much, preferring just to focus on the technical and aesthetic qualities of the map)… I’m not sure any regional/commuter rail system would ever run a route one way up one side of a river and the other direction on the opposite bank like you’ve done with Line 12 in British Columbia. It’s just not at all practical for users! Imagine if I live in Agassiz, and I commute to Vancouver each day: I drive my car to Agassiz station and catch the train. Coming home, I can only return to Chilliwack, which is nowhere near where I left my car. Maybe there are shuttle buses between the two stations, but that just seems incredibly inefficient. I would suggest that most regional rail systems would have one route along the side of the river that serves the most people, or maybe – just maybe! – they’d split the service (but halve the frequency) in both directions on both sides of the river.
The inset central zone London Underground map is a black and white version of Beck’s diagram from the same year, but really, this is all about the fantastic illustrations (by Peter Roberson) and groovy mid-century graphic design. There’s only two colours used here – black and pink – but they’ve been used in a very striking and eye-catching way.
Occasionally, I get in a bit of a rut with Transit Maps – I feel like I’ve seen everything there is to see, or that I’m just treading water – and then something like this comes along that just blows me away.
This poster, designed by Andrea Spinosa of the CityRailways blog (in Italian), provides an incredible look at rail mass transit in Italy, and it’s simply superb.
The centre of the poster gives a country-wide overview, showing where the different urban networks are and the distribution of transit modes – Metro, commuter rail, regional rail, trams and even funiculars (which seem to be surprisingly popular in Italy!).
The real highlight for me, however, are the 15 maps around the edge of the poster that show the transit systems of different cities/regions around Italy. I’ve included images of four of these maps above. Not unlike Jug Cerovic’s INAT maps (April 2014), the new maps redraw these systems using one consistent style for everything, and it looks good. Pretty much all of them look better than their corresponding official map, especially Naples. The typeface used looks like our old friend, Neutraface. I particularly like all the custom icons for points of interest, including ones for Mt. Vesuvius and Mt. Etna, each drawn with the appropriate profile for each volcano.
There’s a lot to take in here, and I definitely recommend that you head on over to the CityRailways site and check the poster PDF out in full. Each of the city maps is also available as a separate, pocket-sized PDF that you can download and print out, or just put on your mobile device and use it that way. There are lots of other great maps to be found on the site as well.
Our rating: Brilliant, comprehensive and beautiful. I’d put this poster on my wall! Five stars!
I got Illustrator CC and trying to work with new Live Corners feature for my 45 degree angles but I just can’t get the value past a certain point 8.12 (as an example) so I can’t match the location of the 2 corners so the lines actually match. Keep up the great work with this Tumblr it has been a real inspiration for me.
This can be a little frustrating, but once you understand how the Live Corners feature works, you can build your diagrams more effectively to avoid this happening in the future.
Basically, Live Corners needs enough length along a line segment to allow it to add new bezier points that define the curve of the radius. If it encounters any other points (even stray points in an otherwise straight path) in the line before the radius you’ve defined is reached, it will use that point to define the maximum radius instead.
Let’s look at two examples. In the first (red) example above, we simply have two line segments that have ample length to accept the Live Corners radius that we enter: in this case, 200 points. Everything works as expected.
In the second (green) example, the horizontal segment only has a length of 100 points, limiting the maximum radius that can be defined. If we select the two corner points that are highlighted and attempt to give both of them a Live Corners radius of 200 points, Illustrator does some maths behind the scenes and determines that the maximum radius it can allow is 119.5 points (there’s some sine/cos/tan trigonometry going on here that I can’t be bothered to work out). That’s because the bezier points that it creates for the curves touch at this value and simply can’t cross over each other. You could define one curve as bigger than the other, but the maximum combined radius value for both curves in this example would be 239 points (119.5 times two). So you could have one radius at 200 points, but the other would max out at 39 points.
So, if you have route lines on your map that change direction a lot in a short distance, your maximum allowable Live Corners radius will get smaller. Either define smaller radii in your diagram, or simplify it to allow larger ones to be used! It also goes without saying that all your route lines have to be joined properly.
