All posts tagged: subway

Photo: Turn on the Bright Lights…

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Photography

Still in Tokyo, but can I just say how much I adore this wayfinding system? Bright and attractive floor-to-ceiling illuminated signs with simple, easy-to-understand iconography and impossible to miss directional arrows (note how they’re located above head height, so they’re always visible, even in a crowd). And there’s a nice big locality map, too! Stuff like this makes a transit system fun and pleasant to use, but its worth often seems to be underestimated. Source: […]

Photo — Historical Map: Boston Sights

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Historical Maps, Photography

Boston seems to rival only Washington, DC for old system maps being left in place at stations and on trains. This photo was taken in August of this year, but the map dates from between 2004 to 2008 (the extension of the Silver Line to City Point is the giveaway). I’d probably lean towards the earlier end of that range, due to the “Silver Line Waterfront” designation. One thing to note is how much cleaner […]

Advertisement: Barclays Center “Minutes From Everywhere”

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Advertising

How to sell New Yorkers on a new stadium: point out they don’t have to drive to it. (Source: ad in the 2nd Avenue F train station.) The problem with doing a subway-themed ad that will appear in the actual subway itself is that it’s not allowed to look anything like the official map. So we end up with this weird Vignelli wannabe instead. However, it does get its point across quite effectively, so in […]

Fantasy Map: Grand Theft Auto IV Liberty City Subway

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Fantasy Maps, Popular Culture

By all accounts, Grand Theft Auto IV is a pretty awesome game. However, it would seem that the game’s designers are lousy urban planners, as this has to be the most ridiculous subway layout I have ever seen. Seriously, it looks like two racetrack layouts from a 1990s video game have been superimposed on the city with some stations added at random. What is the point of the northern track between Huntington St and the […]

Photo: Old Paris Metro Map (Detail), c. 1969-1977

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Historical Maps, Photography

This is simply gorgeous. The fact that the RER terminates at Nation dates this map from between 1969 (when the RATP first purchased the line from the SNCF) and 1977 (when the line was extended through Paris and became the RER “A” line we know today). The original post on Flickr does not note where this map is (or was) located. Source: lionelofparis/Flickr

Historical Map: Paris Métro, 1913

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Historical Maps

Yes, another post about the Paris Métro. I’d stop doing it if I stopped finding really interesting maps! This one is from way back in 1913, and is purportedly the first Métro map to use different colours for each of the lines and the first one to have strip plans for each of them as well. Another thing to note is that this is a mere thirteen years after the Métro opened – and there’s […]

Montreal Metro Board Game

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Popular Culture

Sent my way by Twitter user @andrewsalzberg, here’s another board game based on a transit system – this time, Montreal’s Metro! (Readers may remember this post about “The London Game”, a board game based on the London Underground.) Looks like a pretty simple “race” game, but it captures the aesthetics of the actual map quite nicely. Source: Openalex website – link no longer active