Here’s a great map that shows the rapid transit of Frankfurt am Main in Germany at an interesting point in its development. The Citytunnel that carried lines S1 through S6 under the central part of the city had opened just four years prior to this, and the bridge over the Main that carried the new S14 and S15 lines was constructed in 1980. The year after this map was produced, the Citytunnel was extended from […]
I’ve already featured an excellent unofficial map of Istanbul’s transit network by Kerim Bayer (June 2012, 4 stars), but here’s a new one that’s worthy of some attention. First, let’s note that Istanbul’s transit network has expanded considerably in the last couple of years, and there’s now finally a rail connection across the Bosphorus, as well as a new Metro bridge over the Golden Horn (with a station in the middle of the span, no […]
Unusual and potentially confusing bus map that chooses to colour-code routes by the major thoroughfare that they travel down: all Oxford Street buses are orange, all Farringdon Road buses are lime green, etc. However it’s all a bit of a mess, made more so by the strangely yellow/orange-heavy colour palette. Westminster Bridge is crossed by six routes; five of them are way too similar to each other (orange-brown, yellow, orange, another orange-brown and lime green). […]
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve got nothing against the “… as a subway/tube map” design trope. Having created more than a few of this type of map myself, I’d be a pretty sad hypocrite if I said otherwise. However, it does bug me when a map in this style fails to live up to the fundamental underlying design principles of the piece that inspired it, and that’s what’s happened here. Obviously drawing inspiration from H.C. […]
Not really as bad as all that, but an amusing comparison nonetheless. There’s probably a good reason for the crossed out duplicate route numbers, but I sure as heck don’t know what it is. Source: anna pickard/Flickr
Another amazing historical map from that most fascinating of transit map cities, Berlin. This one shows the U-Bahn and S-Bahn networks of East Berlin in July 1988, just over a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. West Berlin is entirely omitted, with the S-Bahn ending at Friedrichstrasse with no indication of what lies further west of that point: not even a sektorengrenze. The numbers at each station indicate the travel time from the […]
Southeastern’s website contains the following blurb: “Our network covers London, Kent and parts of East Sussex. With 179 stations and over 1000 miles of track, we operate one of the busiest networks in the country. We also run the UK’s only high speed trains.” They should really add: “We also have a network map that makes it almost impossible to work out where our trains actually go.” I mean, what is actually going on here? […]
A nicely executed little montage of Underground maps through the years. From left to right: what looks like the 1932 version of the F.H Stingemore map, the original 1933 H.C. Beck diagram, and a modern day Tube Map. I have to say, the Underground uniforms in the 1930s were a lot nicer than their modern counterparts!
This is just beautiful. Artist Hwan Lee has walked (yes, walked!) to 261 Métro stations in Paris, sketching their many and varied entrances, from the spectacular Hector Guimard-designed Art Nouveau édicules at Abbesses and Porte Dauphine to the more prosaic entrances of the modern Ligne 14. The lively sketches of each entrance are arranged nicely onto a stylised Métro map, with Lee’s walking path denoted by a trail of feet all over the city. Delightful! Source: Hwan’s […]
London’s certainly come a long way since the Metropolitan Line first opened in 1863 with wooden carriages and steam engines. I wonder what a Victorian-era Londoner would think of this modern skyline, all soaring, glimmering, curving glass? Source: transportforlondon/Tumblr – link no longer active
