Thanks to pretty much the entire Internet for sending me a link to Boston Magazine’s story about Maxwell Roberts’ work on alternate MBTA “T” maps. I’m not going to review them all, but I would recommend that you click through and evaluate them yourself. Personally, the rotated hexalinear version shown above is my favourite.*
What I’m interested in talking about is Roberts’ approach to transit map design. Whereas most designers will automatically gravitate to a standard 45°/90° diagram, or maybe consider one or two slightly more unusual options, Roberts explores every variant he can think of, and then some more. Octolinear, hexalinear, tetralinear, concentric, curvilinear… every one is put to the test and designed in full, regardless or not of whether it’s actually a good idea to do so (his rotated tetralinear Boston map really doesn’t work, for example). Although a heck of a lot of work, this approach certainly allows a full and honest comparison of the benefits and drawbacks of every approach, side by side. As he says in the article:
If you don’t try to exhaustively explore a city like this, I don’t think you can really say that you understand how a network fits together, what its key challenges are, and how best to address them.
Roberts is very interested in the psychology of using transit maps – how our brain perceives and processes information presented to us – so his method makes a lot of sense. For example, he strongly believes that curvilinear maps (made up of long, curved lines with no straight segments) have good usability, while I believe that they simply don’t look good from an aesthetic point of view.
*I will point out that all of his maps would have to be reworked when the Green Line extension north of Lechmere opens, as none of them line up properly with the Lowell commuter rail line (which the extension will share right-of-way with). Future-proofing a map is also an important part of the design process!
See also: all posts about Maxwell Roberts
Source: Boston Magazine via everyone who reads the blog!