This map has certainly seen better days! The fact that the Hammersmith & City (salmon pink) line is not shown dates this map prior to 1990: the “peak hour only” dashed line on the very light purple Metropolitan Line, combined with the black text for station names leads me to believe that this is the 1985 map. By 1987, the Metropolitan Line had become a much darker colour, and station labels were the now-familiar blue.
I love it when people find old transit maps still in situ at stations. This Northern Line map at Embankment dates from sometime prior to 1999 (the year that the Jubilee Line platforms at Charing Cross closed), but is still in place today – this photo was taken on February 21, 2013. Note also the beautiful 1914 green glazed tiles next to the map. Source: stavioni/Flickr
A companion piece to the official map (Dec. 2012, 3 stars) on the platform at Rogier station. The look of this map marries with the official map quite well, showing an admirable consistency in application. Rogier station itself is clearly shown with a nice big arrow and stations before it on the lines are clearly indicated against greyed-out route lines. There’s also a nicely legible countdown for the next two trains, indicating their route number […]
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 […]
I’m totally loving this series of work by Nick Saltmarsh on Flickr. By zooming right in on details of the Tube Map, he makes us take another look at something that’s so familiar and ubiquitous. Check out the full set here. Some are more successful than others, but all are interesting… and some make awesome abstract art pieces.
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 […]
An anonymous follower asks: “Do you have any examples of a line map for a loop/circle line? I’m curious as to how those are implemented.” Transit Maps says: Generally, a strip map for a loop or circle line follows much the same principles as a usual one, although the available space may have to be used a little more creatively in order to fit things in. Above are a few interesting examples. London’s Circle Line: […]
As you should know, official transit maps are copyrighted materials. Commercial reproduction of the map by third parties normally requires permission and payment of a licence fee – often a hefty one. A lot of people don’t want to pay that fee, so they design their own version of the map instead. This can result in maps that are eerily similar to the official one, nicely designed but different maps, or horrendous monstrosities. Guess which […]
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 […]
Okay, my head is officially reeling here. Try as I might, I can barely make any sense at all of this fare zone map from Austria’s Verkehrsverbund Ost-Region, the transport association that handles rail and bus transit in Eastern Austria (in effect, the Greater Vienna area). I get that there are eight concentric zone rings radiating out from Vienna, each of which is broken up into smaller zone areas, but after that… There just seems […]
