You weren’t doing anything productive today, were you? Because this neat online game has the potential to waste hours – or even days – of your life as you attempt to build the perfect subway system. Tweak the existing system to make it just so, or start from scratch and build your own dream network. The game will rate you on estimated ridership and per-ride cost, as compared against the baseline of the current system. […]
Submitted by Mikko, who says: Helsinki Regional Transport Authority’s (HSL) draft map of rapid transit and trunk bus lines, published for comments on 16 February 2015. There are multiple errors and readability problems with this version, e.g. the commuter train designation letters are too small to be read, some Swedish-language names are wrong etc. Some notes: names of stations and stops are in Finnish and Swedish (officially bilingual country) the so-called Ring Rail Line (Kehärata) […]
Submitted by John Mullany via email. Here’s an interesting rail planning map from 1969, presumably produced in association with the 1969 Melbourne Transportation Plan. It outlines all the improvements planned for Melbourne’s metropolitan rail system, including a whole bunch of new branches as shown in blue. According to the map, the works depicted were to be completed by 1985. Fast forward to 2015 – some 30 years past that deadline – and only the City […]
Here’s something via Chris Applegate on Flickr, where Chris says: Finally put up and framed the gorgeous vintage Tube map I won in a competition yonks ago. It is gorgeous, but it’s not just a Tube map, nor is it anything I’ve ever actually seen before. It appears to be a Greater London Tube Map/main line railway diagram produced in a Beck-like style – a precursor to this 1988 “London Connections” map (May 2013, 3 stars) […]
Via ddotdc: WMATA planning map, dated March 1, 1968 and last revised by the WMATA Board on June 11, 1970. Please view a full-size, searchable version of the map. (Navigational tools are at the bottom of the map.) On March 1, 1968, WMATA officially adopted a 97.2 mile regional system in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia. On February 7, 1969, WMATA revisited the rapid rail plan and relocated three of the stations, calling instead […]
This is one of the earliest plans commissioned by the City and County of Los Angeles. The consultants – Kelker, De Leuw and Co. of Chicago – were asked to create a plan to accommodate a future city population of three million. Metro’s own history archive has this to say about the project: The plan shows a number of proposed immediate and future subways: one across Hollywood to La Brea Boulevard, another from downtown to […]
And here’s where Cincinnati’s long, troubled history with public transit began… This map shows early route plans for a proposed rapid transit system, roughly corresponding to the modern Alternatives Analysis process. By 1917, a modification of Scheme IV as shown here was chosen and put to a public vote to procure $6 million worth of bonds for construction. The vote passed convincingly, but the United States had entered World War I just eleven days previously […]
Taylor Gibson’s aerial photo map of Portland’s rail and streetcar routes is one of the most popular posts ever on Transit Maps, so I thought I’d pass on this update to it, which now shows the bus network as well. The colours used match the official TriMet system map, although Taylor hasn’t shown peak hour-only services like the 51 up through Council Crest. What this view really shows to effect is Portland’s grid-like bus network, […]
Courtesy of the new and already indispensable hyperrealcartography Tumblr, here’s a simply stunning set of New York transit planning maps from the late 60s. In this modern age of computer-aided map design, a lot of time can be spent trying to digitally replicate this watercolour look, but it’s hard to beat the real thing (although Stamen’s lovely map tiles do a pretty good job!). The north pointer – successfully and cleverly integrating the then-brand-new MTA […]
Here’s another amazing historical planning map, this time from Boston in 1945. Visually, it looks quite similar to this map, but shows an amazing array of planned extensions to the existing system. Some of them were built soon after this map was drawn up:the Revere (Blue Line) extension to Wonderland was essentially complete by 1952, although this map shows the line heading even further north. Others took much, much longer: the (Red Line) to Quincy […]
