All posts tagged: subway map

Photo – Historical Map: TTC Subway Route Map, c.1975–1977

April 30, 2013
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While we’re on the subject of the Toronto Subway map, here’s a beautiful version from the mid-1970s. This particular map is in a preserved subway carriage at the Halton County Radial Railway museum, and shows the subway as it was before the Spadina extension was opened in 1978. This is actually probably my favourite version of this system’s map: it has nice horizontal station labels alternating to either side of the route lines (although Finch […]

Photo – Naked TTC Rocket Map

April 29, 2013
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What goes on underneath the printed map. The lights for the future Toronto-York Spadina Subway Extension stations are already in place in the upper left of the map. Fortunately, the map hasn’t been stolen by someone to reveal these inner workings: it’s simply been moved to the left. This being Toronto, however, it’s probably only a matter of minutes until someone makes off with it to hang on their bedroom/dorm wall. EDIT: As ytomatoboi points out, […]

Historical Map: Washington, DC Metro Map, 1977

April 15, 2013
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As you may know, I’ve had a lot to say about recent iterations of the Washington, DC Metro Map (Rush+ map review, draft Silver Line map review), but how about a look at where it all began? This is a Metro map from March, 1977 – about a year after the system first started carrying passengers. At first glance, it looks very similar to today’s modern map… but then you realise that the only section […]

Historical Map: Circular London Underground Map Sketch, Harry Beck, c. 1964

April 14, 2013
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For those who thought that the two circular London Underground diagrams I featured earlier this year — by Jonny Fisher and Maxwell Roberts — were a completely modern twist on an old classic, here’s a reminder of just how forward-thinking Harry Beck really was. This is a sketch, dated to 1964 at the earliest (due to his adoption of Paul Garbutt’s dot-in-a-circle device for main line interchange stations), that presents the Circle Line as a […]

Design the Boston MBTA Map – For FREE!

April 10, 2013
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Unofficial Maps
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So the MBTA is having a friendly little “contest” for people to design a new “T” map, ostensibly in celebration of National Transportation Week. How sweet and fun! Let’s get real here, people. This is speculative (“spec”) work, pure and simple. The MBTA wants to harvest ideas for a future map from entries, but doesn’t want to pay a red cent for them. The winner gets nothing but kudos and the “privilege” of having their […]

Fantasy Map: Subways of North America by xkcd

April 8, 2013
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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 […]

Historical Map: Plans for New York Subway Expansion, 1920

April 5, 2013
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I found out about this awesome map from a tweet from Vanshnookenraggen (otherwise known as Andrew Lynch) just the other day. Originally, I was just going to post the black and white map from the 1920 New York Times article that the original blog post references, but then I realised that the image on the blog linked to a super high resolution PDF of the map. As I found the map in the newspaper article […]

Unofficial Map: Live Map of London Underground Trains

April 1, 2013
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Submitted by Travertine Libertine. Transit Maps says: Created by Matthew Somerville. Totally hypnotic after a while as all those little yellow train dots start racing around (it kind of reminds me of a mash-up between the Scotland Yard board game and the original Railroad Tycoon). Childhood reminiscing done, it really is amazing what can be done with raw data pulled via an API these days. Stuff like this is the future of transit information.

Book Review: “Vignelli Transit Maps”, Peter B. Lloyd with Mark Ovenden

April 1, 2013
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As a graphic designer with a keen interest in transit maps and a fairly thorough knowledge of their history and usage, I thought I had a decent understanding of Massimo Vignelli’s diagrammatic version of the New York Subway map, which was used from 1972 to 1979. This outstanding book has proved me almost completely and utterly wrong. So much of what we think we know about the Vignelli map is simply hearsay and legend, repeated […]