All posts tagged: cartography

Submission – Unofficial Historical Map: Los Angeles Pacific Electric Railway Diagram, 1917 by Sam Huddy

March 18, 2013
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Drawn and submitted by Sam, who says: Pacific Electric: Challenge Accepted! Cameron, When I read your disappointment on the uselessness of that beautiful map of the Pacific Electric at its peak in 1917 (not 1920), I wondered if it was possible to create a simplified London Underground-style map. With over a hundred routes it seemed impossible, but after several attempts, this was my end result. Any further information is on the map itself. Transit Maps […]

Photo: NY Subway Map and Tokens, 1990

March 15, 2013
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Great little slice of history here. The photographer on Flickr seems to recall the cost of a token as being 60 cents at the time; Wikipedia prices it at $1.15. As a graphic designer, all I can see is the terrible registration in the (cheap) printing – look at the huge yellow halo bleeding out to the right of the green and red printed areas. (In four-colour printing, green is made from combining cyan and […]

Future Map: Washington, DC “Silver Line” Draft Map

March 13, 2013
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Long time readers will be aware of my low opinion of the Washington DC Metro Rail map – here’s a fairly scathing review of the “Rush+” map (March 2012, 2.5 stars) to refresh your memory. It looks like WMATA is preparing for the opening of the Silver Line and has put a draft version of a new map up for comments. According to the blurb there, the route lines are now thinner and station names […]

Photo: Vignelli NYC Subway Map – Street Grid

March 1, 2013
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An image from Massimo Vignelli’s recent talk at the New York Transit Museum about the development of his (in)famous diagram. The chance to hear Vignelli talk about his work really makes me wish that I lived in New York. Anyway, I find this image particularly interesting because it shows the underlying grid of streets and avenues that was used to place the route lines accurately. Although the map we see here appears to be the […]

The Almost Official Map: Ilya Birman’s Moscow Metro Map

February 20, 2013
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I’ve seen a lot of tweets recently linking to the design process page for Art Lebedev’s new official Moscow Metro map (Transit Maps wrote about this page way back on February 4th). However, I haven’t seen as much attention being paid to the second-place winning map, designed by Ilya Birman. He also has a design process page for his map, and it’s just as fascinating as the Lebedev one. He discusses the difficulty of having […]

Submission – Official Map: Josephine County Transit Bus Map, Oregon

February 19, 2013
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Submitted by Matthew Harris, who says: This is the official transit map for Grants Pass, Oregon (Josephine County) and it will supersede your German map (February 2013, 0 stars) as the worst transit map. Transit Maps says: I knew it!!! I knew as soon as I gave a score of zero, something else would appear that was even worse. A blurry, muddy, incomprehensible mess without any useful labeling at all. The inclusion of property boundaries on […]

Official Map: Bus System of Meiningen, Germany

February 14, 2013
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Submitted by Heikki Salko, who says: You keep mentioning how “there must be something worse out there.” Personally I like to think it will always hold true, but I’d still like to see your opinion on this official map from a small German town. Someone linked to it in a discussion about line numbering/naming systems, but I have to admit I didn’t quite have the courage to try figuring out that much detail… As a […]

Official Map: Streetcar Network, New Orleans, 2013

February 11, 2013
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Brought to my attention by Transit Maps follower, Alex Marshall, this is the latest New Orleans streetcar map, updated after the opening of the new Loyola Avenue line in January of this year.  Have we been there? No. One day! What we like: Informationally, it does the job, I guess. It shows the routes and connections to other services in a neat, easily understandable way. It’s just so… dull. What we don’t like: The very best transit […]

More Tariff Zone Maps: The Ugly Stepsisters of the Transit Map World

February 6, 2013
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Yesterday’s post on Eastern Austria/Greater Vienna’s tariff zone map certainly attracted some attention: I’ve already received quite a few links to similar maps from different (mainly European) locations. Shown here are the tariff zone maps for Munich, Glasgow and Hamburg, all of which are bewildering in their own way. As some commenters have pointed out to me, these maps seem to be a bit of a necessary evil: the transit agency needs to have some […]

Historical Map: Los Angeles Pacific Electric Network, 1925

February 1, 2013
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A beautifully rendered (just look at those lovingly drawn mountain ranges!) old-school map of the famous “Red Car” network at its absolute zenith. It was pretty much all downhill after this: real estate sales from land that had been opened up by the network (the real money that allowed the rail service to continue to run despite operating losses) began to decline and many rural services were converted to cheaper buses around this date. In the […]