Submitted by Tom, who says:

Australia’s two rival cities are currently separated by Covid-Curtain. Whilst commuters are also separated from their daily commute in the meantime, let’s explore an alternate universe timeline where the cities have swapped their network maps!

Transit Maps says:

What a fun little project!

What I particularly like is just how far Tom has taken the “body swap”: the real Melbourne map shows V-Line services out into regional Victoria, so the “Melbourne-ised” Sydney map does the same… whereas the official Sydney map stops at the edges of Greater Sydney, so the “Sydney-fied” Melbourne map follows suit. City Circle becomes City Loop, and vice versa. Line nomenclature gets swapped, and so on. Even service names become more like their adopted homes: V-Line becomes VicLink to mimic NSW’s TrainLink. It’s all rather wonderfully done.

Overall, Tom has done a great job of recreating each style, although the type for the Melbourne map isn’t quite the right font and should be black instead of dark gray. The big terminus lettering for Cranbourne and Frankston seems unnecessarily cramped, and I really would have liked to see the Stony Point Shuttle line use the exact shade of teal that the Sydney Metro uses – most of the work has already been done by using the same cased line and the superfluous “S” for each station marker… the right colour just would have made everything perfect. The Sydney map is pretty much spot-on, however – even down to the way that lines outside the “zone boundary” get compressed into very tight and unrealistic spaces.

The other main takeaway is just how much this version of Sydney map looks like the pre-2013 CityRail map (September 2012, 3.5 stars), which probably says something about the slightly more generic design language that the current Melbourne map uses: ticks for stations, rounded corner rectangles for interchanges, etc.