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, […]
I’m loving this interactive map by Oliver O’Brien that uses entry and exit data direct from TfL to build a picture of how the Tube across the course of a typical day – with around 5 million rides or so. (The data doesn’t yet include the newly-introduced Night Tube, so things wrap up as the last “day” trains finish their journeys at the moment.) Watching the day progress is mesmerising enough – especially the flow […]
Look what I just found while going through some dusty old boxes! I picked this lovely Tube Map bathroom tile up at the London Transport Museum in 2004, and brought it with me when I moved to the U.S. – where it has unfortunately remained in its box ever since. As best I can tell, it was made by artist Tony Davis around 2001, and was part of a set of six tiles that covered most […]
For Johnston Sans’ 100th birthday, TfL has commissioned Monotype to redraw the typeface, bringing the design back closer to its original roots in many respects. Going forward, it will be this cut that will be used on all new TfL signage, maps and collateral. The redraw also introduces two new weights – Thin and Hairline – that I remain unconvinced by. I suspect they’ve been added for online usage and advertising purposes, but they just […]
Question: Have you seen the interview Londonist did with the designer of the new London Underground map? Really fascinating! Answer: I sure have! If anyone hasn’t seen it yet, then head over to the Londonist website and watch the interview here. Personally, I wish it was more in-depth and technical, but that’s because I’m a total and utter transit map-making nerd who loves that kind of stuff. The interview does make a couple of very […]
<Image removed at request of Transport for London, December 20, 2019> Surprisingly, I haven’t seen anything like this on the Internet before, so I went and made my own. It’s been compiled from various sources (both official and unofficial), so the quality is a little variable, but it’s still fun to look at! I’ve made the dimensions of the circle/ring consistent across all the different versions, so the height and width of the crossbar shrinks […]
Thanks to Oliver O’Brien and CityMetric for finding this new Tube map that highlights the new Elizabeth Line (the line formerly known as “Crossrail”) route across London. (Side note: I think I’ll call this line the “CrossLiz” from now on, as – let’s be honest – the Queen always looks a tiny bit cranky these days.) First off, let’s examine the CrossLiz itself. Placing an entirely new line right through the centre of an already crowded […]
One of the things I love about the London Underground is the seemingly endless cavalcade of official Tube maps: the normal map, large print, color-blind friendly, step-free access, geographical… and now this: where and when you’re allowed to bring your bike. Foldable bikes are allowed pretty much everywhere (but not during peak travel times, please!), but full-size bikes are much more limited in where they can go. In general, the allowed areas for such bikes […]
A little while ago, someone asked me on my "Transit Maps" blog whether I had ever seen a map of the New York subway system in the style of the London Underground diagram. Rather surprisingly, I hadn't actually come across one, so - surprise! - I decided to draw one up myself.
Here’s a little video primer about H.C. Beck’s famous Tube map, put together by the London Transport Museum’s Acton Depot. It’s a breezy little introduction to the most famous and influential transit diagram in the world, but it unfortunately repeats and perpetuates a couple of misconceptions about the map and Beck himself. (I’d expect a little better from the London Transport Museum!) At first, I even thought the initial statement that Beck was “out of work” […]
