All posts tagged: bus

Historical Map: 1980 Spokane Transit System Tourmap

May 23, 2014
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Check out this eye-poppingly bright bus map from Spokane, Washington, brought to my attention by Zachary Ziegler of the Transit 509 blog. Produced by a local design firm, this seems to be the first attempt at any sort of bus map in Spokane. It’s notable for the interesting way that the route lines overprint each other when they cross, which creates an interesting sort of plaid pattern where many routes meet downtown. Adorable little colour-coded […]

Official Map: Schwäbisch Gmünd Stadtbus, Germany, 2014

May 19, 2014
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Let’s continue our recent look at small- to medium-sized German bus networks with this network map from Schwäbisch Gmünd in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, submitted by Bert. I find this map interesting, because it really shouldn’t work as well as it does. While simplified, there doesn’t seem to be any real logic or unifying design principles behind the angles used for the route lines: they just seem to be drawn to make the routes fit together. Despite that, the […]

Official Map: Oklahoma City EMBARK Bus Network by Kyril Negoda

May 18, 2014
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mappingtwincities: A Note on the Making of Oklahoma City’s Transit Map I recently had a pleasure of designing a system map for EMBARK, Oklahoma City’s transit agency. The network is being made both more frequent and more direct to meet a growing demand. Oklahoma City is often compared to Austin, Texas for their effort to re-imagine the state’s biggest city to be less car-depended and more human-scale and user-friendly. I’m proud to be a part […]

Fantasy Future Map: Sydney, Australia by Thomas Mudgway

May 15, 2014
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Thomas, who is a ninth-grader (i.e., he’s just 14 or 15 years old), says: Sydney, my home town, has around 4.7 million people and already has a commuter rail network, however, the city is growing, and the network doesn’t cover everything, so I have augmented the network in many places, as well as showing how it could grow into the currently undeveloped far south- and north-west (they are generally the places where the stations have […]

Submission – Official Map: Bus Network of Göttingen, Germany, 2014

May 14, 2014
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Submitted by Hubert at the same time as the awful Marburg map. Of this map, Hubert says: Check out the intertwined lines in the city center! I find this approach very interesting and useful and I would really like to hear your thoughts about this. Transit Maps says: The intertwined (or “candy-striped”) lines in the city centre are definitely the most interesting thing about this map. The rest of it is a competent, if unexciting, […]

Submission – Official Map: Bus Network of Marburg, Germany, 2014

May 12, 2014
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Submitted by Hubert, who says: You really should review more ugly, messed up maps as they serve as deterrent examples. This eyesore of a map is what made me aware of the fact that transit map design is not as easy as it seems. I once sat in line 7 and it took me twenty minutes to figure out whether the bus served the Elisabethkirche Station in my direction of travel. This is literally the […]

Historical Map: Map of Glasgow Corporation Transport Services, c. 1934

April 10, 2014
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A handsomely drawn map that does some sterling work with just three colours (a very modern combination of black, cyan and magenta!). Of particular note is the clever way that a solid magenta line (bus service), can be combined with a dashed black line (trams) to indicate where both types of transportation share the same route without having to draw two separate lines. Interestingly, buses appear to have route numbers, while trams are designated by […]

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 […]

Submission – Historical Map: Boston Elevated Railway System Map, c. 1946

March 19, 2014
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Kindly sent my way by Ross Howard from his personal collection is this great old map of the Boston Elevated Railway (or BERy). Ross thought it may have been from the 1930s, but a little Googling has revealed that this version – the seventh edition – was released in 1946-1947, making it the last BERy map before its operations were taken over by the MTA, itself a predecessor to the current MBTA. The map itself […]