An unused test diagram for Boston’s rapid transit network from 1991. It attempts to name every station on the branches of the Green Line, but with the unfortunate side effect of completely dominating the design. The poor old Blue Line gets shoved into the top right, and the northern part of the Orange Line doesn’t fare much better. In short, the whole thing is hideously unbalanced, and I’m very glad that this concept didn’t advance […]
I must admit that when Ramin sent me a link to his Behance project page for this map a while ago, I assumed it was a (very accomplished) unofficial project. It was only when I followed the website link at the bottom of the sheet that I realised that this was actually the new official map for the Baku Metro. It’s definitely a huge improvement over the previous lacklustre version (second image above) and looks […]
Submitted by David, who says: This all started about 17 years ago as an exercise to teach myself to use Macromedia Freehand. The years passed, Freehand became Adobe Illustrator, and I continued to work on it. The original Idea was to create an A4 sized map to carry around in my pocket, but it quickly became apparent that to contain the desired detail and remain legible it would have to be printed at A1 or […]
If you ever do a Google image search for the map of the Minsk Metro, you’ll quickly find out that there are a lot of dreary, hackneyed and downright terrible versions of it – both official and unofficial. Despite the simplicity of its X-shaped two-line system (with a third in the works), it just doesn’t seem to inspire good design work. Until now. Ilya Birman – whom Transit Maps has featured a number of times […]
A classic New Yorker cover, showing the much-maligned Second Avenue Subway (still five years from completion of even Phase 1 at the time of publication) wending its way past a series of increasingly unlikely stations. Papua New Guinea, Saturn and the Yukon Territories are my favourites.
The early history of the United States is filled with explorers and pioneers making use of rivers as “rapid transit” to quickly travel through otherwise inhospitable or unknown lands. So it makes sense that someone would attempt to show this network in the simplified form of a subway map, and here is one such example by Theo Rindos. Of course, such a map instantly puts me in mind of Daniel Huffman’s superb series of river/subway maps, […]
Submitted by Bailey, who says: Here’s a map from of the Qingdao Metro for Line 3 – quite an interesting, stylistic one. For all the effort that went into the (quite brilliant) artwork, I’m surprised the station names are entirely unreadable near the city center. Transit Maps says: Despite the name, Line 3 is actually the first Metro line constructed in Qingdao, opening in two stages from 2015. In typical Chinese style, it’ll be joined […]
Submitted by moon-monolith, who says: This is the current map (as of May ‘17). This version has the definitive design for the newer lines under construction (Line 3 and Line 6). And finally, they’ve decided not to include the airport on the map, even tho’ there’s some rumors floating around that a planned extension of Line 1 or a new “Line 7” could reach it once and for all. Transit Maps says: This is a […]
Submitted by Frederico, who says: This is a diagram for a fantasy network serving my hometown, Vitória, Brazil – my first try designing a transit map. If you showed this to a local, they would laugh at you – that’s because the city doesn’t have any type of rapid transit (not even bus lanes), even though it has almost 2 million habitants. The local government has been promising a BRT system more or less following […]
In the late 1960s, Chicago actually seriously considered knocking down the elevated parts of the “L” and replacing it all with a modern subway network. The plan originally called for multiple lines, but these got whittled down over the years for a variety of reasons – lack of funding being one of the major ones. By 1977, all that remained on the table was the Franklin Street Subway, shown in red in the handsome illustrated […]
