Now this is a map! This is just superb cartography: detailed, clear and lovely to look at. I love the way that brown is used for mountainous features, and a light blue is used for water features – it allows this information to be visible, but it doesn’t compete with the overlaid railroad lines. The map is packed with other information as well – note the three rail gauges in use in Argentina at the […]
Submitted by Marc, who says: I thought you might enjoy poring over a transit+points of interest map I recently drew of Center City Philadelphia. I’ve collected bird’s eye urban panoramas since I was a child, and I particularly enjoy panoramas that have placemaking and wayfinding value, such as those drawn by Jenni Sparks and other artists. I also find there’s no better way to learn and demystify seemingly-complex bus service than drawing it a couple […]
Yes, that James Niehues. As you’d expect from the acclaimed master of ski resort maps, the mountains in this map are gorgeously rendered, and Amtrak’s routes are drawn as straight red lines — almost as if they were ski lifts across the country. I particularly like it when a route line “disappears” behind a particularly tall mountain — it’s something that really sells the implied dimensionality of the map. It is perhaps unfortunate that some […]
Here’s a very handsome little map showing the lines of the Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway from sometime in the late 1930s. By this point in time however, almost all of the routes were run by buses, making the name of the company somewhat ironic. Just two streetcar lines remain: Fields Corner to Quincy (with branches from there to Quincy Point or Houghs Neck), and Sullivan Square to Stoneham. The map itself is drawn in a […]
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 […]
I’ve been sworn to absolute secrecy on this project since mid-January, so I’m very excited to finally share it. Early today, Field Notes (the purveyor of beautiful memo and note books) released their latest quarterly limited edition, “Mile Marker,” with cover designs celebrating the Interstate Highway system. Included with subscriptions – and available for separate purchase on the Field Notes website – is an old-school foldable highway map, designed by me in collaboration with the […]
A mid-1970s map of the LIRR, designed specifically to be given to “news media representatives who cover the Long Island Railroad (sic) and the MTA on a regular basis”, presumably to give them accurate facts at their fingertips when they wrote about the railroad. 234 miles of line! 700 scheduled trains a day! It’s a curious thing, drawn precisely in parts (see the lines out of Jamaica) and very roughly in others; the illustration of […]
This is one of those maps where I’m not entirely sure if it’s the brainchild of a genius or the work of a madman. It’s an insanely detailed map-slash-diagram of tram routes in Sydney from 1921 by an unknown author that also attempts to indicate almost every major cross-street along the way. Intersections that are also designated as tram stops get a marker and increasingly larger labels to indicate their relative importance. Five different line […]
Blue Crow Media is an independent publisher of beautifully designed city guide maps on many subjects – you may be familiar with their “Brutalist Architecture” series – and this new map is the first in a planned series of maps about public transportation networks around the world. Edited by Mark Ovenden (of Transit Maps of the World fame) with some lovely photos by Will Scott, the map promises to be an authoritative guide to the design and architecture […]
By now, many of you will know that I’m working on reworking my diagram of TGV routes in France from 2011. While doing research, I came across this absolutely stunning track map of all railways in France, produced by Latitude-Cartagène, who were also responsible for this great diagram of transit in the Ile-de-France. Seriously, the level of detail in this is just amazing. Single-track, double-track and multiple-track lines are all shown individually, with extra differentiation […]
