Submitted by Nicholas, who says:
Hi Cam!
Like many here, I’m a longtime fan, transit map lover, and amateur mapmaker. I am originally from São Paulo, and as you already know, not only do we lack a system comprehensive enough to meet passenger demand, but we also lack a map that is well designed and aesthetically pleasing. With more than 12 million inhabitants, São Paulo is the largest city in the Americas and daily, more than 8 million people ride on the 340 km of combined subway and suburban rail lines that cross the metropolis. To better serve the needs of the population, several expansion projects are underway, with 3 new lines being built and 3 existing lines being extended.
These projects, once completed, will alter the layout of the transit network in the city and will need to be reflected on the map that is seen and used each day by millions of passengers – something today’s design cannot accommodate so effortlessly.
These changes provide an opportunity to seriously revaluate and rethink the current design, as well as to propose a new vision for the future – a vision that goes beyond just designing a good looking and functional map, but one that also aims to change how Paulistanos view their city and they move about it.
With this in mind, I finally followed through a long desire of mine to redesign the system’s map.
Although I can’t say I am too much of a fan of the recent wave of using concentric circles and radial lines to redesign several of the world’s major transit networks, I found that this approach works surprisingly well for São Paulo. This represents a radical departure from the actual design and breaks the restrictions imposed by the “standard” 45 and 90 degree angles currently in use, allowing elements (namely station names) to be better distributed and preserving a sense of geography near the center. Some distortion was inevitable however, given the length of the suburban rail lines that extend east and west.
My biggest concern though is the size of my map. I’m not so certain it could be easily implemented on the rolling stock, but I think it has potential to be used on stations, or maybe even in an app, where size is not an issue.
It would be great to get your feedback (and dare I ask, a rating) on this as this is really the first transit map for a real-world system that I put together. I’ve worked on some smaller projects, but nothing as involved as this before.
Transit Maps says:
Like Nick, I’m not always an immediate fan of radial transit maps – I believe that the shape of the city should guide the design, not the other way around. The conceit works perfectly for some cities (like Amsterdam, for example), but other circular designs are shoehorned onto cities that such an approach really doesn’t work for.
While I’m not overly familiar with São Paulo, a quick look on Google Maps shows that it does have quite a circular structure, with ring roads readily apparent. So I think that a circular approach is definitely worth trying here, and the result is rather nice indeed. it’s certainly more aesthetically appealing than the official map (last reviewed back in 2012, but still very similar today). I really appreciate the effort taken to future-proof the map with the addition of lines currently under construction, and the comprehensive legend does a great job of explaining everything on the map.
I will say that I’ll never agree with labelling stations in the same colour as their corresponding route line – it always creates a visual imbalance between the dark, strong colours and the light, recessive ones. Here (as always), the Yellow Line is the one that suffers the most.
While we’re on the subject of colours, Nick uses three small circles to denote services available at stations: blue for elevators, green for bike parking and red for car parking. This is problematic for colour-blind users, as the red and green dots look almost identical for them. Nick might consider using three different shapes to properly differentiate these simple icons – a diamond for elevators, a circle for bikes and a square for cars, perhaps?
Our rating: A compelling reinvention of a complex network map. There’s a lot to like here! Three-and-a-half stars.