All posts tagged: subway

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 […]

Photo: Mexico City Metro Linea 3 Map… or List

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About as simple and directly to-the-point as a line map can get. Really, it’s just a bulleted list, with each station’s icon serving as the bullet. Of note though, is how each icon has its own very distinct shape within the square (with a rounded corner) framework. Each is easily identifiable, even from a bit of a distance.  Source: dogseat/Flickr

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 […]

Official Map: Daytime Transport Services of Budapest, Hungary, 2014

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In addition to the Metro/suburban rail only map that was introduced with the new Metro Line 4, there’s also this more comprehensive city map that adds tram, key bus routes, ferries and more to the mix. It’s more directly analogous to the old Budapest map (July 2012, 2.5 stars), and is also highly reminiscent of this Prague integrated transit map (August 2012, 4 stars). Definitely aimed at tourists (the PDF file even has the word […]

Official Map: Budapest Metro and Suburban Rail, 2014

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With the recent opening of Budapest’s Metro Line 4, there’s been a rethink behind the city’s transit map. The previous version (July 2012, 2.5 stars) tried to show everything – Metro, suburban rail, regional rail, tram and key bus routes – on one map, but it was all a bit of a mess. With so many thin, colour-coded lines (using a strangely limited palette), things became very difficult to understand. Hence this new approach, where […]

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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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 […]

Future Official Map: Pearl River Delta Rapid Transit

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Future Maps

Sent my way by David Edmondson of The Greater Marin, this is an incredibly large (the dimensions of the PDF are 145″ x 101″ or 386cm x 256cm!) and very comprehensive map of the planned Pearl River Delta Rapid Transit system. Currently under construction, the idea behind the system is to have every major urban area in the region to be less than an hour away from Guangzhou (the huge urban area in the blue […]