I love it when people take my criticism of a map and use it as inspiration to come up with an alternative solution. Having seen my recent review of the new official map (October 2016, 1.5 stars), Peter took it upon himself to redesign it – and quickly, taking less than a day to come up with his version. Peter obviously agreed with a lot of my concerns about the official map, because he’s addressed […]
Submitted by lukasmaps, who says: I think I’m gonna hurl… Shows buses, but NOT the Metromover? Come on. Transit Maps says: Well, it at least shows the stations that you can transfer to the Metromover at (all two of them), so it’s kind of on par with the buses – no actual bus routes are shown, just a list of numbers at each station. Showing the Metromover on this map is problematic because of the disparate […]
I thought I was all done with “to scale” maps of North American rail systems, but then Dennis McClendon (see previous posts from him) sent in this beautiful series of maps that he produced for Planning magazine back in 1984. Dennis himself says: Given this week’s Tumblr theme, I thought you might be interested in these maps that I did in 1984, when I worked for Planning magazine. The “new wave” of modern light rail […]
Submitted by Isaac Fischer, who says: Here’s a neat map I found online that shows the entire American east coast, as well as southeastern Canada. It shows both commuter and intercity rail lines. As far as I can tell, it seems fairly accurate, and could definitely be useful. Transit Maps says: While there’s more than a passing resemblance to my own Amtrak Passenger Rail map here – both in the general aesthetics of the map […]
Obviously inspired by – and clearly credited as such – the brilliant xkcd “Subways of North America” map, here’s a quite staggeringly detailed map of pretty much every rail-based rapid transit system in North America, including future expansions and upcoming new systems like Honolulu’s HART elevated light rail. Like the xkcd map, all the systems link up at their termini to form one giant Metro map that spans the entire continent. True, the map isn’t […]
Very aesthetically appealing infographic that compares 18 circle railway lines from around the world. The top part of the graphic displays the lines in a schematic fashion, representing each by its average diameter. The stations that comprise each line are then simply spaced evenly around the circumference to create a very striking pattern. Stations that interchange with other lines are represented by placing a small white dot in the centre of a station’s marker. Below, […]
I’ve had a couple of requests to review this one, so here goes… For me, this map is an excellent example of the overwhelming averageness of a lot of transit mapping here in the US. Yes, it does the job – you can work out how to get from here to there and where to make connections – but it’s just so completely bland and unmemorable. Everything about the map seems to be completely generic, […]
My Twitter feed and inbox are both absolutely overflowing with references to this map from the “xkcd’ web comic, so here’s a post about it! xkcd has always been a comic for geeks, and has a long history of awesome map-related work – my favourites include this Lord of the Rings movie narrative map, and the particularly carto-nerdy discussion of map projections – so it’s nice to see the strip’s attention turn to this particular facet […]
Here’s a seriously curious photo, brought to my attention by reader Ryan Vansickle. It shows the new signage that has been put in place for the opening of the new Orange Line in Miami that we just featured. Apparently, this sign has been at the Douglas Road station since February, which is impressive pre-planning! However, the curious thing is that it doesn’t match the actual system map in any way whatsoever. True, this is a […]
Miami’s Metrorail just opened a new station at Miami International Airport, and decided to create an entirely new line (the Orange Line) to celebrate. Along with that, comes a new system map… which is, unfortunately, pretty terrible. Have we been there? No. What we like: The icon for overnight/long-term parking lots is actually pretty neat. What we don’t like: Poorly chosen background colours make the road grid hard to distinguish from the background. On that […]
