The Map Room

Mapnificent is a neat tool that shows the area that can be reached by walking or public transit from a given point — the idea being that you can figure out, for example, which neighbourhoods would be within a 30-minute commute of your workplace. The video above explains how it works. Via Andrew Sullivan.

More fodder for the long-running argument between geographically accurate subway maps and system diagrams in the style of Beck’s London underground map: a new study suggests that schematic transit maps — and the London tube map in particular — distort passengers’ travel path choices. That’s the conclusion drawn by NYU professor Zhan Guo in a paper published in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice (a PDF of the manuscript is available).

[T]he map effect is almost two times more influential than the actual travel time. In other words, Underground passengers trust the tube map (two times) more than their own travel experience with the system. The map effect decreases when passengers become more familiar with the system but is still greater than the effect of the actual experience, even for passengers who use the Underground five day or more per week.

Via Second Avenue Sagas.

The Washington Post on the upcoming redesign of the Washington Metro system map: “More than three decades ago, Lance Wyman designed the Metro map’s iconic interlocking colored lines, which have become the symbol of the transit system for millions of Washington commuters and tourists. Now he’s been hired to give it a makeover.” Via @jpmaps.

Meanwhile, there has been an unofficial competition to design the next map of the Washington Metro. Announcement here, entries here; voting closed last month. (Thanks to DK for the tip.)

Adam Bentley’s map of an imagined future rapid transit network for Ottawa and Gatineau has apparently generated a lot of online buzz; on Spacing Ottawa, he discusses the map’s inception and reception.

A Flash animation that morphs between the Beck tube map, the modern variant thereof, and a geographical map of the London Underground, previously on the Transport for London website, has resurfaced on its designer’s home page. No idea when it moved, but it’s worth another look all the same. Via @HodderGeography.

Franklin Jarrier’s maps of urban rail systems are neither network diagrams nor geographically accurate maps, though they have elements of both: they’re extremely precise maps of the metro systems that include the number of tracks, platforms, closed stations and routes,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A collection of maps of the Moscow metro is so extensive that it must have all of them. (Above, one from 1935; they go as far back as 1931, and there are nine from 2010.) In Russian. Via @spatialanalysis….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A whole cloth quilt based on a map of the New York subway system. Karyn’s used a diagrammatic map that confused me for a moment: since the map comes from the New York City Transit Authority, it dates from…  •  Continue reading this entry.

An exhibition called Harry Beck and the London Tube Map, which is “based on a local private collection and traces the development of the London Underground map from the 19th Century to the present day,” is running at the Church…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A series of “map movies” from the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council provide cute animations of public transport and exercise-based travel. “The Council has produced several map movies which show bus, cycling and walking routes around the borough,” says the website….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Alexander Chen’s “Conductor” recreates the New York subway map as a musical instrument, with subway lines as pluckable strings. It’s based on Vignelli’s 1972 subway map, which makes sense for this kind of project. It’s a work in progress, and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

James Bunting wrote in with a link to this map of the Greater Tokyo railway network; the user’s Flickr account has other railway network maps showing the systems of other Asian cities, now and in 2020. (No indication whether…  •  Continue reading this entry.

To illustrate the impact of a four-degree rise in global temperatures and a four-metre rise in sea levels, Practical Action has released a London tube map showing which stations would be underwater. Via io9 and Londonist; thanks also to…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Benjaman Kabak has a detailed report on the panel on the design of the New York subway map held last night at the Museum of the City of New York (previously). Via Mark Ovenden. Update, Dec. 11: Another report on…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via Cartophilia: this wallet showing a map of the Chicago transit system is made from Tyvek….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Eddie Jabbour writes to let us know about an event at the Museum of the City of New York on December 7 about designing New York subway maps “for the riding public.” Featuring John Tauranac and Massimo Vignelli in addition…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Etsy seller fugudesigns has a number of interesting copper cuffs, many of which have etched city maps, subway maps, or subway stops in their design. Chicago, Detroit and New York are featured. $50 apiece. Via Cartophile….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Eddie Jabbour’s KickMap — an imaginative redesign of the New York subway map that tries to address the confusing and complex network of express and local lines — first came to my attention in 2007. Since then, the KickMap…  •  Continue reading this entry.

AllSubway HD is an iPad app that collects more than 100 subway and mass transit maps from cities around the world. That’s about all that can be said about it: it’s essentially an image viewer, with no other features,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Brian Cook has imagined a Metro for the Hartford, Connecticut area, and designed a map redolent of Harry Beck’s London Underground and the style of the Paris Metro. He’s doing a limited print run, too. Via Mark….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via many sources (for example, Ed Parsons and Google Maps Mania), this live train map of the London Underground, showing the real-time position of each train. It’s a mashup of Transport for London data with the Google Maps API, but…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century urban rail transit maps from the University of Chicago Library’s map collection. Zoomify format; Flash required. Via MAPS-L….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Eric Fischer took publicly available data from the Muni — the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency — showing the geographic coordinates of their vehicles to create this map showing average transit speeds over a 24-hour period. “Black is less…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A large collection of official metro maps of cities around the world collected by Webdesigner Depot; it’s interesting to see which maps use a Beck-style diagram and which ones are more geographical. Via Jennifer. Buy Transit Maps of the World…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Joe B. has this to say about the differences between the diagrammatic, iconic London Underground map and the hash that has been the maps of the New York subway system: “The simplicity of the London diagram comes in part from…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Maps Mania and Mapperz are enthusiastic about Transport for London’s new Google Maps-based bus route map; the area bus maps, in PDF format, are some of the most confusing system maps I’ve ever seen….  •  Continue reading this entry.

An interesting story on the website of Chicago-area antique map store George Ritzlin Antique Maps and Prints: “The most unusual map we’ve ever encountered recently walked (literally) into our gallery. A nice young woman mentioned in the course of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Rachel Berger compares BART’s new, geometric system map with its wigglier, geographically accurate antecedent, providing the now-familiar (for those of us following the debates on subway system map design) context from other cities’ subway systems. Honestly, I’m not sure…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark Ovenden notes (with obvious delight) that his book about the Paris Metro, Paris Underground (which I reviewed in November 2009), got a glowing mention on the New Yorker website (much like Strange Maps did in October). Previously: Review:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark Ovenden, author of Transit Maps of the World (reviewed here) and Paris Underground (reviewed here), has a new blog….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The following is a guest post by Mark Ovenden, who relates how, in the cavernous confines of the abandoned Court Street Subway station in Brooklyn, now re-used as the Transit Museum, three great innovators in the world of transit map…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Paris Underground: The Maps, Stations, and Design of the Métro by Mark Ovenden Penguin, 2009. Softcover, 176 pp. ISBN 978-0-14-311639-4 It’s possible that I know the Paris Métro better than any other subway system in the world. In the summer…  •  Continue reading this entry.

While browsing in, of all places, a science fiction bookstore, I stumbled across a new book by Mark Ovenden that looked quite interesting in the brief time I had to look at it: Paris Underground: The Maps, Stations, and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Erin Jang: “This was my present to my nephew for his 3rd birthday. He loves, loves, loves the subway so my sister asked me if I could make a custom map with all the places that mean something to…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here’s a collection of old Boston transit maps, collected from the Net and the Massachusetts State Transportation Library by Andrew Lynch. Via Cartogrammar….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Boston’s MBTA is upgrading the maps in its stations; some of the neighbourhood maps haven’t been upgraded in 40 years. The system maps show services that will not be operational for another month, but that’s nothing compared to the trouble…  •  Continue reading this entry.

London mayor Boris Johnson to Transport for London: put the Thames and the fare zones back on the Tube map (see previous entry). They’ll return to the map’s next version, due in September….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Uh-oh. The latest version of the Tube map omits fare zones and the Thames. That controversy has ensued should come as no surprise to anyone who follows the mapping of the London Underground. (I expect that a parody based on…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here’s a new Tube map for you. Transport for London has released a map showing how hot it gets on London Underground station platforms (PDF). Which is to say, very. (And I thought Paris Metro stations were bad.) The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Treehugger has a gallery of what they consider to be the world’s most impressive subway maps. (These are the official maps, rather than some third-party iteration.) Via Teresa. Previously: Review: Transit Maps of the World. Buy Transit Maps of the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

“Augmented reality” superimposes computer graphics on real-world imagery; here’s a demo of a forthcoming application for the iPhone called New York Nearest Subway, which superimposes directions to nearby subway stops on top of imagery taken with the iPhone’s camera. It…  •  Continue reading this entry.

John Tauranac writes, “Last November I came out with a new map [of the New York subway], which combines a Beck-like map on one side with a truly geographic map on the other.” He writes about it on Gotham…  •  Continue reading this entry.

As a child I drew on road maps, adding streets, freeways, even whole cities where none would ever exist. Dieter Janssen’s map of an imagined Toronto subway network in 2030 has a more serious purpose: he hopes his map,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via Boing Boing, a cross-stitch version of the London Underground map….  •  Continue reading this entry.

It’s a pity that this hoodie with a map of the New York subway printed on it seems to be sold out, because, you know, want. Via Platial….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark Ovenden — author of Transit Maps of the World — has the fascinating story of how Harry Beck tried to create a map of the Paris Métro in the style of his iconic map of the London Underground….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I can’t believe I didn’t notice Radical Cartography’s Urban Mass Transit Systems of North America before. This map plots the mass transit systems — subways, light rail, busways, whatever — of U.S., Canadian and Mexican cities circa 2005 on…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Randy Plemel has been making stroller- and wheelchair-accessible maps of transit systems — in other words, maps where only the accessible stations are shown; non-accessible stations are erased. After earlier takes on the London Underground and New York Subway,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google has announced a transit layer for Google Maps. Stations have been visible before; this layer adds the lines. It’s available for a total of 58 cities so far; I imagine Londoners used to the Beck diagram will have…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Korean design firm Zero per Zero has done some interesting things with urban transit maps; in addition to subway maps of Seoul, Osaka and Tokyo that look like Beck diagrams through a fisheye lens, they’ve done a rather unique…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google “has added New York City transit directions and brought its ads to the Big Apple, wrapping an ‘S’ shuttle train that runs between Grand Central and Times Square. Trouble is, the directions it gives in the ads aren’t always…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Montréal now has transit trip planning in Google Maps. A good thing: Montréal is an awful place to drive, but its Metro is wonderful; it’s one of the few North American cities where it’s relatively easy to go car-free. Ottawa…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A 1987 BBC documentary on Beck’s diagrammatic map of the London Underground; it’s nearly 26 minutes long: Via Kottke and MapHist….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A Sony ad campaign for its Walkman digital audio players shows subway network maps made from black Sony earphones. (Because they can’t be white earphones, silly.) In addition to the New York subway map poster making the rounds, there…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Urbanrail.net is a fan site about the world’s urban rail networks; it features an extensive collection of rail network maps that are produced by the site’s author and are original to the site, though (and this is to be…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 map of the New York subway system, which introduced a Beck-style diagrammatic transit map to the city (and which New Yorkers were not prepared for; the map was controversial and encountered opposition before it was replaced in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Transit comes to Chicago….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Contour lines have been added to Google Maps’s terrain map layer, which adds its their usefulness (especially, for example, in a mountain context). But it has some way to go before it’s a suitable replacement for a topo map;…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Transit Maps of the World by Mark Ovenden Penguin, 2007. Paperback, 144 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-14-311265-5 Billed on its cover as “the world’s first collection of every urban train map on Earth,” this is, in fact, the second revised edition of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cartophilia has a review of Mark Ovenden’s Transit Maps of the World — well, it’s not so much a review as an excuse to share images of transit maps, but I certainly don’t mind. I’ll be ordering my own…  •  Continue reading this entry.

BART, the San Francisco Bay area rapid transit network, is getting new network maps, SF Weekly reports. The new maps will, in the words of a BART spokesman, “have more straight lines” in the idiom of other, diagrammatic maps of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark Ovendon’s Transit Maps of the World sounds delightful: it’s a compendium of maps of urban rail systems of more than 200 cities around the world. Cory Doctorow is smitten: “This is sheer public transit/map porn, and I’m in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A couple of quick updates about Google’s mapping stuff — quick updates seem to be all I have time or energy for at the moment, what with the full-time contract and the resulting lengthy commute. Google Transit’s features have been…  •  Continue reading this entry.

An animated map depicting the history of the New York subway: “[a]n animated GIF starts with a blank subway map and draws each line in the sequence in which it was built.” For more maps showing the history of New…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yes, the iPhone has Google Maps on it, but Khoi Vinh feels the need to carry along a mobile version of the official New York Metropolitan Transit Authority subway map on his iPhone. His solution is what he calls…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Transit adds Reno and San Diego; I must have missed when they added the Japanese rail networks, domestic airlines and ferries. Google Maps for mobile supports GPS on certain devices — for example, the BlackBerry 8800 and some Windows…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Numan Parada’s map of an extensive, and imaginary, rapid transit network for Los Angeles is one of several on the web site of the Transit Coalition, a public transit advocacy group. The maps envision a Los Angeles with a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Tubemap Wallet is one of those ideas that sounds really neat — even practical — in theory: a special wallet that folds out to reveal a map of either the London Underground or the New York subway. The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In this four-minute outtake that didn’t make it into the final version of the documentary film Helvetica, designer Massimo Vignelli talks about his 1972 map of the New York subway system — which, you may recall, encountered stout opposition….  •  Continue reading this entry.

After posting the entry about the new Madrid Metro map, it occurred to me that familiarity may be as important as good design: a new map design will almost certainly encounter resistance from users of the current design if the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Rafa Sañudo has designed a new map (3.1-MB PDF) of the rapidly expanding Madrid Metro (Wikipedia), but some residents, especially train enthusiasts, are upset with the new design, the Times reports. They much prefer the old map (123-KB PDF),…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A large gallery of subway maps that includes cities that you might not know have a subway system. The maps aren’t much to write home about, graphically speaking, and they don’t include light rail systems even when they’re a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Torontoist calls this transit map of Toronto “the best map ever in the history of anything.” What it looks like to me is the TTC transit map superimposed on a Google Maps interface. Not that that isn’t impressive in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you want your city to be included in Google Transit, point them to the Google Transit Feed Specification, which sets out the format in which the transit data must be encoded. Via Google Blog. Previously: Google Transit Adds Five…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In response to Transport for London’s crackdown on London tube map remixes (previous entry), the Wikimedia Commons is putting together a series of freely available maps of the London Underground. The maps are generated using PHP to process GPS…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Making subway maps is more than just choosing between Beck-style diagrams and geographically accurate maps, or something in between; as with any good map design, colour choice matters too. Yale Daily News tells the story of alumnus R. Raleigh D’Adamo,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Sure, laminated paper versions are cheaper, but a credit-card-sized, stainless steel map of the New York subway or London Underground is, well … it’s something, isn’t it? It’s fifteen bucks, anyway. Via Gizmodo, where they seem to think it’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Homebrewed subway maps for the Nintendo DS, including London, Lyon, Mexico, Paris and Vienna. Some hacking required. Via Matt….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Transit, the trip planner that includes public transportation data, started last December (see previous entry) with Portland, Oregon as its single city, presumably as a proof of concept. Today they’ve added five more cities: Honolulu, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Tampa, and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Gawker’s New York City Subway Smell Map, a Google Maps mashup with attitude: “Created from reports sent in by Gawker readers, the map displays particular smells — horrific and sublime — encountered throughout New York’s subway stations.” And you thought…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Despite the success of Beck’s London Underground diagram, New Yorkers have historically resisted diagrammatic subway maps, preferring instead maps that are a bit more geographically accurate and take into account surface features like parks, bodies of water and neighbourhoods….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Boing Boing reports that the archive of silly Tube maps (previously mentioned here) has gotten into a spot of legal trouble and has been taken offline. As a followup on this question, have a look at Stefan’s post about…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The anagram map of the London Underground I mentioned last month has since been hit with a cease-and-desist by Transport for London. In response, and in an act of solidarity, someone else created an anagram map of the Toronto subway…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’m still up to my neck in Olympics nonsense, but I’ve got a few links to share with you that have been accumulating in my “post these soon” file. For all you tube map fanatics, a London Underground Map where…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In other Google News: Google Transit, which seems to be an in-house mashup of Google Maps and public transit data. It calculates costs and displays bus and rail routes and times; the examples give some idea of the parameters you…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Attention London tube map freaks: Oskar Karlin, whom we’ve met before, designed a new map of the London Underground as a design project. “I knew couldn’t just do a normal re-design; something had to be added. I started thinking what’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A little while ago William Bright started a web site where you could download subway maps to your iPod, taking advantage of the photo-storage capabilities of iPods with colour screens (see previous entry). Then some metro transit authorities caught wind…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Subway maps aren’t just for iPods any more; Engadget points to subway maps for the Playstation Portable: a map of the New York subway (in defiance of licencing policies) and maps of other cities’ subway systems. I don’t recall this…  •  Continue reading this entry.

iPodSubwayMaps.com has received cease-and-desist letters from the New York and San Francisco transit authorities, who are invoking their copyright on their system maps, which the site breaks into iPod-screen-sized pieces that can be parsed via the scroll wheel. The developer,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I like what Jef’s done with this map of the Paris metro done with Google Maps. The lines are laid out as vectors, and it includes routing between two points, including line changes and estimated travel time. Via Google Maps…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you’ve got an iPod with a colour screen, you can put subway maps on it. It’s a simple matter to put digital images on an iPod; where maps are concerned, though, it’s a challenge to make sure they’re legible…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Feòrag’s London Underground map (343 KB JPEG) edits out the lines that were closed due to yesterday’s bombing incidents. Via Boing Boing….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Fed up with delays on the London Underground, Stef took Transport for London’s tube disruption maps and spliced them together into a three-minute time-lapse movie that shows delays over a 15-day period. The result? “London Underground is disruption free, a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Over on environmental blog WorldChanging, Jeremy Faludi calls for open-source public transit mapping services, on the basis that online mapping services are focused on driving directions rather than transit, and that transit services aren’t as useful or user-friendly, and lack…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If the amount of maps, software and hardware available is any indication (see previous entries: 1, 2; the Seattle Area Traffic page has moved since that July 2003 entry), the traffic around Seattle can’t be very good. Now here’s another…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This page shows the real-time position of trains in the Greater Copenhagen commuter rail network. The trains are colour-coded to show how on time or late they are. Note that the page uses Java. (Nicolas Jasson hid this gem in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Don Sattler writes, “I’m in London on vacation and would love to purchase a large map of the tube system to hang on my office wall. I can’t seem to find one. Do you know of any shops that might…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Tube map fanatics should not miss the ultimate MetaFilter post on the London Underground. Some stuff you may have seen before, even here, but it’s all in one spot, see?…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Nicolas Jasson has submitted a frighteningly impressive number of links to Japanese rail and transit maps. His e-mail, which I’ve edited to incorporate links into the text, is as follows: I am very interested in railways and transit and Japanese…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ben Tesch has posted subway maps for Oslo and Tokyo on Flickr, which is handy….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A homemade New York subway map that includes other railroads and is based on the London diagram. Says the designer: My design goals were to present a simple, clear diagram of all the passenger railroads in the city and just…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The London Tube Map Archive has a new URL, now that sitehouse.net is no longer operative. I don’t know when it happened: I linked to the old address in April 2003; The Cartoonist linked to the new address on Sunday….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Why should the London Underground map get all the attention (see previous entry)? The New York Times has a brief story (usual registration caveats) on the origins of the current New York subway map, which dates to 1979. Thanks James….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last Thursday’s Guardian — they do seem do have a lot of map-related content, don’t they? — had an article about Henry Beck, the creator of the iconic London Underground map that ditched scale and proportionality in favour of clarity….  •  Continue reading this entry.

For you Tube map freaks: R. Gardiner has taken a geographically accurate map of the London Underground and superimposed it on a satellite image of the city. Very effective. Via Here Be Dragons….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Las Vegas’s monorail, which opens July 15, connects several hotels/casinos along the Strip (naturally). Here’s a map of the line. Via Slashdot….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Subway Page has a simply monstrous list of links to maps of various subway, light rail and commuter rail systems around the world. Some official, some homemade, many of places less well known. If the London Underground can have…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here’s another subway map, sort of. Every day, more and more people are having graphical fun with a map of the London Underground. Ralf links to one where the names have been “translated” into German. I am told by German-speaking…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Subway systems of the world, presented at scale (via Kottke). I only know Paris’s system personally (see previous entries: Paris Metro, Maps as Mnemonic Aid — My Trip to Paris in 1997), and it looks like surface trams, but not…  •  Continue reading this entry.