Submitted by Jan, who says: Hi Cameron, thanks for the amazing work you do on this site! I just noticed that one of the maps that I see the most often in real life has not been featured here (as far as I can tell): the regional train network map of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s northernmost state. It can be found here [PDF link]. Looking at it after perusing your site for a while, it is easy […]
I’ve had quite a few requests for this one and I’ve been meaning to write about it for quite a while, so here goes! This one’s definitely worth presenting as a before/after comparison – the new 2022 diagram above compared to the previous 2021 below: It’s no secret that I’ve been somewhat skeptical of radial diagrams in the past – seeing them as perhaps a little too flashy for their own good and often being […]
Submitted by Cédric, who says: I got interested in a historical map of the Moscow Metro featured on this site some time ago (November 2012, 4 stars). The radical simplicity of the visual language, using only straight lines and circles, gives a unique quality to the map, both in its high legibility and evocative power. Realizing that it would be geometrically impossible to recreate this design to fit today’s expanded Moscow metro network, I started […]
Submitted by Simon, who says: Hamburg, Germany’s line map always strikes me as one of the most ugly maps depicting a major transit network – one can understand if the ones made for small town bus networks are not up to the design standard of the upper echelons like Moscow or the like, but a city like Hamburg having such a bad map is just strange. The convoluted knot of lines around the main station […]
Thanks to everyone who has alerted me to this rather wonderful map of the German Intercity rail network, created by a Reddit user known only as “theflyingindonesian”. This is actually something that I thought about tackling after I finished my French TGV network map way back in 2011, so I know how daunting and complex a project this is! If you’ve never seen the official Deutsche Bahn diagrams for these networks, prepare to be very […]
Submitted by Niklas, who says: Hi! I’m a student currently living in Berlin. I’ve always been fascinated by maps and recently I started to design one of my own. I hope you would review it on the blog, and give me some pointers as to where it can improve. I wanted to redesign Berlin’s Transit Map in a different style (or rather my own). The map shows all U-Bahn (Metro), S-Bahn (Urban Rail) and Regional […]
Here’s a superb visualization of the fastest travel times by rail to major European cities from Frankfurt am Main (here rendered in its obsolete English form of “Frankfort”) in 1928. The striking time bands – a form of isochrone – are rendered in bold alternating concentric “target” circles around the city itself, represented by a modernist “F” logo. For the most part, the cities seem to placed along correct headings relative to Frankfurt, although the […]
Submitted by Simon S., who says: I recently travelled through Basel, in North West Switzerland and noticed this map. It shows the suburban train network of the city, that reaches into Germany and France. I think the map itself is quite well made (very simplistic), but my subjective observation is that the system isn’t as unified as it seems – neither DB nor SNCF advertise their respective as “S-Bahn Basel” or “RER Bâle”. You can […]
Submitted by Moritz, who says: It’s me again, Moritz – this time with an unofficial redesign of the light rail and regional rail map of my hometown, Dortmund. The light rail network itself is based on a simple principle where the trunk routes form a triangle in the city centre, thus allowing to reach every station with no more than one change of trains at one of the three central intersecting points. To depict this […]
All transit maps should have their own cool launch video! And this one certainly makes the map look very intriguing, with its more geographically faithful and organic layout. The distinctive Hundekopf (dog’s head) shape of the S41/S42 Berlin Ringbahn is certainly very apparent! The larger font size is also quite obvious, even at a distance. The only minor quibble I have about this video is that it calls this map “THE new map”, contrasting that against “the […]
