All posts tagged: 1977

Historical Map: Denver RTD Bus Network, 1977

October 2, 2019
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A great example of late 1970s American transit map design from Denver’s Regional Transportation District (RTD) with thick, chunky route lines, minimalist design sensibilities and tightly letter-spaced sans serif headings. The map has the potential to get messy really quickly, but it’s actually all handled rather deftly and cleanly. Colour-coding differentiates between different service types (local, express, circulator and regional), and route numbers and road names are placed inside the thick route lines, which generally […]

Historical Map: Proposed Franklin Street Subway Line, Chicago, 1977

March 30, 2017
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In the late 1960s, Chicago actually seriously considered knocking down the elevated parts of the “L” and replacing it all with a modern subway network. The plan originally called for multiple lines, but these got whittled down over the years for a variety of reasons – lack of funding being one of the major ones. By 1977, all that remained on the table was the Franklin Street Subway, shown in red in the handsome illustrated […]

Historical Map: Hand-drawn fare zone London Underground Map by Phil Roe, c. 1977

October 14, 2016
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Phil Roe is a London Underground employee with over 40 years of service. While working in ticket offices in the 1970s, he was worried that he was too slow in calculating fares for customers, so he drew up his own fare zone diagrams for each station he worked at. The example below is for Green Park station, and the fares are in pence!  His maps predate the official usage of zones on the Tube Map, […]

Submission – Maps from the 1977 “Golden Gate Transit Guide”, showing South Marin and Larkspur Ferry Bus Services

February 5, 2016
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Submitted by Denis Agar, who says: Check out the Marin County transit maps on page 110 of this thesis (source below). They’re so distinct! Maybe you’ve seen them but I couldn’t NOT send you these. Vignelli much? Transit Maps says: I haven’t seen these before, Denis – and you’re right: they’re absolutely fantastic. I feel that the mid- to late-1970s was a time when America actually embraced clean, modernist “European” design, especially on the West […]

Historical Map: 1977 MBTA Guidelines and Standards Manual – Graphics

December 23, 2015
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A page from the 1977 MBTA Standards Manual showing the specifications for a map panel as installed at the entrance level of a station, using Kendall inbound as an example. Signage much like this can still be seen across most of the rapid transit network. Interestingly, there’s no Kickstarter campaign to reissue this particular standards manual, perhaps because it wasn’t created by a famed Italian modernist designer and is typeset in the most basic manner […]

Historical Map: San Francisco BART & Buses Map, September 1977

June 17, 2014
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Front cover for a 1977 map of BART and connecting bus services with some great late-1970s typography: tightly spaced Helvetica, yum! That BART icon is also pretty amazing and is just asking to be digitally recreated. However, there’s something screwy about that map, as much of BART appears to be located in or underneath the San Francisco Bay. Global warming, perhaps? Hardly: some quick Photoshop analysis reveals that  the underlying map has simply been erroneously rotated […]

Submission – Historical Map: Chicago Regional Transportation Authority, 1977

April 4, 2014
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Submitted by Dennis McClendon, who has previously submitted material related to transit mapping in Chicago that I’ve featured on the site. This map is a real beauty, and I definitely appreciate Dennis’ ability to talk about the technical aspects of cartography in the days before computers. We take computer-aided design almost completely for granted today – but map-making was a laborious, manually performed task back then, where a scalpel, a light box and rubylith film […]

Photo – Historical Map: TTC Subway Route Map, c.1975–1977

April 30, 2013
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While we’re on the subject of the Toronto Subway map, here’s a beautiful version from the mid-1970s. This particular map is in a preserved subway carriage at the Halton County Radial Railway museum, and shows the subway as it was before the Spadina extension was opened in 1978. This is actually probably my favourite version of this system’s map: it has nice horizontal station labels alternating to either side of the route lines (although Finch […]

Historical Map: Washington, DC Metro Map, 1977

April 15, 2013
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As you may know, I’ve had a lot to say about recent iterations of the Washington, DC Metro Map (Rush+ map review, draft Silver Line map review), but how about a look at where it all began? This is a Metro map from March, 1977 – about a year after the system first started carrying passengers. At first glance, it looks very similar to today’s modern map… but then you realise that the only section […]

Photo: Old Paris Metro Map (Detail), c. 1969-1977

September 17, 2012
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This is simply gorgeous. The fact that the RER terminates at Nation dates this map from between 1969 (when the RATP first purchased the line from the SNCF) and 1977 (when the line was extended through Paris and became the RER “A” line we know today). The original post on Flickr does not note where this map is (or was) located. Source: lionelofparis/Flickr