All posts tagged: subway map

Historical Map: East Berlin U- and S-Bahn Map, 1988

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Historical Maps

Another amazing historical map from that most fascinating of transit map cities, Berlin. This one shows the U-Bahn and S-Bahn networks of East Berlin in July 1988, just over a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. West Berlin is entirely omitted, with the S-Bahn ending at Friedrichstrasse with no indication of what lies further west of that point: not even a sektorengrenze. The numbers at each station indicate the travel time from the […]

Illustration: Walking the Paris Métro by Hwan Lee

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Illustrations, Unofficial Maps

This is just beautiful. Artist Hwan Lee has walked (yes, walked!) to 261 Métro stations in Paris, sketching their many and varied entrances, from the spectacular Hector Guimard-designed Art Nouveau édicules at Abbesses and Porte Dauphine to the more prosaic entrances of the modern Ligne 14. The lively sketches of each entrance are arranged nicely onto a stylised Métro map, with Lee’s walking path denoted by a trail of feet all over the city. Delightful! Source: Hwan’s […]

Historical Map: San Francisco BART & Buses Map, September 1977

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Historical Maps

Front cover for a 1977 map of BART and connecting bus services with some great late-1970s typography: tightly spaced Helvetica, yum! That BART icon is also pretty amazing and is just asking to be digitally recreated. However, there’s something screwy about that map, as much of BART appears to be located in or underneath the San Francisco Bay. Global warming, perhaps? Hardly: some quick Photoshop analysis reveals that  the underlying map has simply been erroneously rotated […]

Historical Map: Rapid Transit Plan by the City of Seattle, 1920

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Historical Maps

Here’s an interesting map that shows a plan for rapid transit that city engineers envisioned for Seattle way back in 1920, almost 100 years ago! The map shows a subway running beneath Third Avenue from Virginia to Yesler, coming to the surface near the railroad stations – essentially the route followed by the present-day Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. Trains going up to Capitol Hill would follow a line up Pine Street that would be alternately […]

Unofficial Map: “MetroMan” Beijing Subway Map by Lyt

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Unofficial Maps

Submitted by Xuan, who says: Hey Cameron, I am wondering if you’d be interested in reviewing this unofficial subway map of my hometown – Beijing. The author is Lyt, aka “lighthunter”. I think his version is 100,000 times better than the official map. I think he deserves an ovation. Although China now has the longest subway mileage in the world, most Chinese transit maps are hideous. That’s why I figure this map could be a […]

Historical Map: Opening of the Los Angeles Metro Red Line, January 30, 1993

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Historical Maps

A very simple map showing the first segment of Los Angeles’ Red Line on its opening in January 1993. The Blue Line (part of which is also shown on this map) had opened three years earlier. The map is mainly notable for the “RTD” logo that belonged to the Southern California Regional Transit District, the immediate ancestor of today’s Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA, or more commonly, just “Metro”). In fact, the LACMTA […]

Submission – Photo: Toronto TTC Strip Map at St. George Station

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Official Maps

Submitted by criacow, who says: Check out this wayfinding sign at St. George Station in the TTC subway here in Toronto. (My blurry photo, but TTC signage.) Up is north, but *left* is *east*—they flipped on an axis rather than rotating—and ‘eastbound’ isn’t noted anywhere. I’ve lived here for years and even I was confused by this until I looked at the specific station names! Transit Maps says: I’ll agree that this does look odd […]