Now this I like. This map takes Moscow’s famous Circle Line and straightens it out completely: all other lines then attach to it parabolically (becoming curved when before they were represented as a straight line). Great work, even if not that practical for real-world use. Source: bifurcafe/Flickr – link no longer active
Old streetcar maps often do a very poor job of actually showing how the routes ran – often just drawing an otherwise unmarked red line down the middle of roads on a standard cartographic map without any explanation of stops, loops or route names (see left for an example). Finding accurate information about the actual routing of individual lines can be a long and thankless process, so when long-time Transit Maps correspondent Karl Otterstrom tweeted […]
Submitted by Cédric, who says: I got interested in a historical map of the Moscow Metro featured on this site some time ago (November 2012, 4 stars). The radical simplicity of the visual language, using only straight lines and circles, gives a unique quality to the map, both in its high legibility and evocative power. Realizing that it would be geometrically impossible to recreate this design to fit today’s expanded Moscow metro network, I started […]
Submitted by Simon, who says: Hamburg, Germany’s line map always strikes me as one of the most ugly maps depicting a major transit network – one can understand if the ones made for small town bus networks are not up to the design standard of the upper echelons like Moscow or the like, but a city like Hamburg having such a bad map is just strange. The convoluted knot of lines around the main station […]
Finally! A comprehensive reworking and redrawing of one of my original projects – a diagram of the European International E-Road network. First drawn back in 2010, It’s a piece that’s always had a place in my heart, but I’ve always put off updating or reworking it over the years because I was just never quite sure how to bring anything new to the table. However, the recent successful revision of my Interstate Highways as Subway […]
This handsome birds-eye view map of eastern Washington State comes from the Pullman Primer, a prospectus put together by the Pullman Chamber of Commerce in 1911 to attract business to the city. It shows the city nestled in the foreground, surrounded by the fertile lands of the Palouse, with Seattle and Portland in the far distance. All across the plains stretch the lines of the many and varied railroad companies of the day, connecting Pullman […]
Transit Maps previously reviewed Blue Crow’s London Underground Architecture and Design Map back in 2017, and they’ve just released two new maps in the series celebrating Paris and New York’s transit systems (there’s also another map in the series for Moscow). As before, the maps are simple but elegant in their execution, with a geographical map of the system on one side and the explanatory text and photos on the other. They come in handsome […]
Here’s a superb visualization of the fastest travel times by rail to major European cities from Frankfurt am Main (here rendered in its obsolete English form of “Frankfort”) in 1928. The striking time bands – a form of isochrone – are rendered in bold alternating concentric “target” circles around the city itself, represented by a modernist “F” logo. For the most part, the cities seem to placed along correct headings relative to Frankfurt, although the […]
So, after almost a month, 32 matches, and some 37,000 votes, the inaugural Transit Maps World Cup has reached its conclusion. Unexpectedly, perhaps, the victor wasn’t London, Moscow or one of the other pre-tournament favourites, but the Santiago Metro of Chile. Without a doubt, this win was engineered by a huge social media blitz within Chile which mobilized a large number of people to vote for “their” map. I don’t really think that the Metro itself […]
Let’s have some fun! Presented here are 32 cities from around the world (12 from the Americas, 12 from Europe and 8 from Asia), representing a wide range of rail-based rapid transit map design. They’re arranged into four groups of eight: the Red and Blue Lines contain cities from the Americas, while the Green and Orange Lines are comprised of European cities. The 8 Asian cities have been spread evenly across the four groups and […]
