So, after almost a month, 32 matches, and some 37,000 votes, the inaugural Transit Maps World Cup has reached its conclusion. Unexpectedly, perhaps, the victor wasn’t London, Moscow or one of the other pre-tournament favourites, but the Santiago Metro of Chile.

Without a doubt, this win was engineered by a huge social media blitz within Chile which mobilized a large number of people to vote for “their” map. I don’t really think that the Metro itself was entirely responsible for this, as the groundswell of support started more organically than that and only spread to the Metro Twitter account in full for the semi-final and final. The Chilean Ministry of Transportation also got involved, and even the Mayor of Santiago tweeted about it. If that wasn’t surreal enough, Channel 13 produced a four-minute news report about the final result, and the tournament also got coverage in local press. No other city came close to matching the passion and word-of-mouth that Santiago produced, though Vancouver and Sao Paulo also had some good social media efforts. Unfortunately for Vancouver, they came up against Santiago in the Round of 16, so their efforts went in vain.

And therein lies the rub. I can’t exactly praise Vancouver for their outreach efforts (which included posting on their blog to give actual concrete reasons why their map was awesome) and then turn around and denounce Santiago for doing much the same. A huge part of winning any election is “getting the vote out”, and Santiago did that more effectively than anyone else. In a way, I set myself up for this with the format of the competition, as an open poll on the internet is always susceptible to some sort of manipulation. I guess I’m actually lucky that the winner didn’t end up being “Mappy McMappyface”.

Do I personally think that the Santiago map is the best rapid transit map in the world? Absolutely not. In my opinion, the Moscow map is head and shoulders above everything else that’s around at the moment, honed and battle-tested over years of revision and testing, complex yet clear, and future-proofed for the next few decades at least. It’s a phenomenal piece of work and I’m in awe of how good it is. The Santiago map is better than average, and I perhaps underestimated its clear simplicity, but I don’t see it as a world beater.

In the end, though, I’m not really sure that the winner even matters that much. For me, the best part of the tournament was the conversation and discussion that it created on the way. The often completely diametrical viewpoints on what makes a “good” transit map were fascinating and illuminating. Geography versus topology? Street grid or abstraction? Points of interest or a blank canvas? Some maps were definitely held to more exacting standards than others, being brought to task for blemishes that were excused on other “lesser” maps.

Size and complexity of networks was also a hot topic, with both large and small systems accused of having an inherent “advantage” over the other. Smaller systems are easier to depict neatly, said some. Complex networks look more impressive, others replied. It’s impossible to compare a large network to a small one, said yet others. I don’t really agree with this, otherwise almost seven years of giving maps a numerical rating on this blog would have been a complete waste of time. Regardless of network size, a map can still be terrible or amazing, depending on the design choices made. I’ve seen large systems made crystal clear and small systems made an incomprehensible mess, all because of decisions made by the map’s designers. Perhaps a better way to frame the voting would be to ask, “which of these two maps does a better job of representing/depicting/clarifying the transit network shown?” rather than the simple “which is better?” question used in this tournament. Food for thought!

So what now? First off – a break until 2020, I think. Like the real event, a World Cup every year would be too much of a good thing, and I don’t want to wear out my welcome too fast.

Also, a change of format from the 32-team knockout to a 16-team competition with four groups of four cities. The initial round would be round-robin within each group, with the top two teams from each group going through to knockout quarter finals. The top eight teams from this edition automatically qualify, with the other eight to be selected and seeded by some yet-to-be-determined means before the 2020 tournament starts.

Finally, the polling method needs a rethink. I like the immediacy of Twitter and the discussion it can instantly generate, but it’s obviously the easiest format to influence via retweets and social media interactions. I don’t want to make participation difficult or exclusionary, though, so I’ll have to put some thought into this…

Finally, an enormous thank you to EVERYONE who participated and made the tournament far larger and more interesting than I ever hoped it could be. And hang around, there’s lots coming up on the blog that I hope you’ll find interesting!

All the best,

Cameron
Transit Maps, 2018