All posts tagged: commuter rail

Photo: Turn on the Bright Lights…

October 3, 2012
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Still in Tokyo, but can I just say how much I adore this wayfinding system? Bright and attractive floor-to-ceiling illuminated signs with simple, easy-to-understand iconography and impossible to miss directional arrows (note how they’re located above head height, so they’re always visible, even in a crowd). And there’s a nice big locality map, too! Stuff like this makes a transit system fun and pleasant to use, but its worth often seems to be underestimated. Source: […]

Official Map: Sydney CityRail Network Map, 2012

September 12, 2012
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Here’s a map that has been requested quite a few times, but I’ve held off on until now. Having lived in Sydney most of my life, I think it’s difficult to be dispassionate about something I’m so familiar with… but here goes! Have we been there? You know it! What we like: Clear and easy to understand. Different types of services are denoted well, but in a nicely understated way: grey lines with coloured ticks […]

Official Map: Metropolitana di Napoli, 2012 (2 of 2)

August 22, 2012
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As promised, here’s the second map of Naples’ Metro system. Unlike the previous example, this one shows all of the rail transit options available in the city, which presents a much more complete picture. Like the previous map, this map also presents something that I’ve never seen before on a transit map: a “Rainbow Line” (arcobaleno in Italian), where each station on the line is assigned its own colour. However, this map and station signage […]

Historical Map: Tokyo by Richard Saul Wurman, 1984

August 13, 2012
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Thanks to Chris Helenius for bringing this amazing map by Richard Saul Wurman (founder of the TED Conference amongst other things) to my attention. In the course of research for this post, I also discovered that Mr. Wurman was responsible for these beautiful maps of Philadelphia from the book Man-Made Philadelphia: still the most-visited post on Transit Maps by far. But onto the map itself. Firstly, this is not a map of the Tokyo subway, as […]

Official Map: Commuter Rail Services of Helsinki, Finland

August 10, 2012
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Here’s a different type of transit map altogether… if one could really call it a “map” at all. Showing commuter rail services out of Finland’s capital, Helsinki, this matrix instead focuses on showing stopping patterns on the four colour-coded commuter lines. Each pattern is clearly denoted with a letter that corresponds to a train – not unlike the local/express services on the New York subway – making finding the correct train to catch easy and […]

Postcards from Paris – Métro Edition

July 26, 2012
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Here’s an interesting comparison of three different postcards of the Paris Métro system – one of which uses the official RATP artwork, and two more which definitely don’t. All three are of similar vintage (from at least 2007, as they all show the southern end of Line 14 at Olympiades station, which opened in that year). So they’re all basically showing the same thing, but take different approaches towards it. The first postcard uses the […]

Official Map: MAXX Commuter Rail, Auckland, New Zealand, 2012

July 24, 2012
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Time to get away from North America and Europe and head further afield… about as far afield as you can go, actually! Here’s the system map for Auckland, New Zealand’s commuter rail system. This map, available from the MAXX website, seems to be based off the map they place above doors in the actual train carriages. This explains the horizontal format which skews the Southern Line out to the right of the map instead of […]

Historical Map: Chicago Plan Commission – Rapid Transit Facilities, 1945

July 23, 2012
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Here’s a gorgeous pre-CTA planning map from Chicago in 1945, outlining all sorts of grandiose ideas for expansion of the subway system, almost none of which have actually come to pass. There appears to be a proposed second Loop, which would have run more east-west than the existing one. There’s also a planned subway line heading out to the northwest, but this doesn’t follow the same alignment as the Blue Line, and a subway line […]