All posts tagged: cartography

Photo: Lithuania and the World

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Official Maps

A rather odd map of Lithuania on the wall at the Klaipeda inter-city bus terminal. Ostensibly, I guess it depicts the coach network, or even just the nation’s main highways, but it does seem odd to have a city – Alytus – marked on the map when there’s no apparent way to get there. There’s also a couple of interesting choices made for international destinations: Tallinn and Riga (the other Baltic state capitals) are fair […]

Historical Map: Indicateur d’Itinéraires, Paris, c. 2003

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Historical Maps

An old-school interactive Metro map in Paris. Simply press one of the 360 or so buttons underneath the map, and a path lights up from your current location to your chosen destination. Who needs a fancy touch screen kiosk? I particularly like the way that the furtherest reaches of the RER lines are compressed into diagrammatic form to allow the centre of Paris to be shown as large as possible. This particular example is still […]

Historical Maps: Evolution of the Stockholm Metro Map, c.1958-1971

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Historical Maps

Here’s a fantastic photo showing three versions of the map for the Stockholms tunnelbana, probably taken at the Stockholm Transit Museum. By comparing the three maps and the looking at the stations shown on each of them, I’ve roughly dated each as follows. The top map is from between November 19, 1958 (when the Farsta station opened), and November 14, 1959, when Rågsved station (shown on the middle map, but not on the top one) opened. The […]

Official Map: San Francisco Bay Area Regional Transit Map, 2013

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Official Maps

Submitted by Reed Wagner, who says: This map appears to be part of a greater “wayfinding” campaign by the SF Bay Area MTC – it appears at major Caltrain, Muni and BART stations and presumably is elsewhere (I took this picture at Caltrain 4th & King. In comparison to the maps made by Calurbanist, it seems that the official MTC map is falling short in every regard other than information overload in a messy form. Transit Maps says: It’s pretty […]

Historical Map: The City of Los Angeles Showing Railway Systems, 1906

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Historical Maps, Prints Available

Here’s a great old map of Los Angeles showing the already-booming rail transit network that was found in Los Angeles in the early days of the 20th Century. Electric trolleys first ran in LA in 1877, but  the “Red Cars” of the Pacific Electric and the “Yellow Cars” of the narrow-gauge Los Angeles Railway had only appeared a mere five years before this map was produced. Their lines are represented on the map in appropriate […]

Historical Fantasy Map: St. Paul in the Year 1900 (Map c. 1871)

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Fantasy Maps, Historical Maps

Definitely one of the stranger maps I’ve seen, and obviously meant to be read in a satirical light. It shows the city of St. Paul, Minnesota as an enormous METROPOLIS with Roman Road-straight railroad connections to all points (except to the “village” of New York, which is served by a “tri-weekly horse railroad”), a tunnel to “Peek-in” and a “railroad-balloonic route” to the North Pole and thence to the Moon. From America’s east coast, a […]

Historical Map: Plans for New York Subway Expansion, 1920

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Historical Maps

I found out about this awesome map from a tweet from Vanshnookenraggen (otherwise known as Andrew Lynch) just the other day. Originally, I was just going to post the black and white map from the 1920 New York Times article that the original blog post references, but then I realised that the image on the blog linked to a super high resolution PDF of the map. As I found the map in the newspaper article […]

Historical Map: Kroll’s Standard Map of Seattle, 1914

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Historical Maps

As Seattle continues with its expansion of light rail (East Link, University Link) and streetcar (Capitol Hill streetcar), here’s a look back at the city 99 years ago. This isn’t a transit map per se – rather, it’s a map of the city that also happens to show the transit network in no uncertain terms. The thick dark lines that traverse the city like veins are all streetcars, cable cars and interurban trains. Main line […]

Big Project – Work In Progress Screen Shot

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My Transit Maps

Some people have asked how I’m going on my new big project – a simplified map of all U.S. Highways and Interstates on the one map. Well, here’s where I’m at currently. Everything in the western half of the map is pretty much finished: the east coast needs to be revisited for consistency and there’s still a whole heap of work to do in the south east. I actually feel that I’ve left the hardest […]