Abraham Dein makes transit maps in the style of other transit maps—notably, a London Tube map in the style of a Paris metro map, emphasizing express lines and anchored by orbital routes. But he’s also got other cities, like Barcelona, Glasgow and Paris, drawn in the London or Paris style, on his Instagram and TikTok pages, and for sale on his Etsy page. Via Mark Ovenden, who interviewed Dein on his CATCH-cast program.
Category: Transit
Northern’s New Network Map
Matt Harrison explains how his firm, Transport Designed, redesigned the network map for Northern, a train company that handles passenger services across northern England, from Liverpool to Newcastle.
Northern’s historic network map, whilst representing the sheer size and scale of the train operator’s network, didn’t actually show you where you could travel to and from.
It represented the network as an amorphous blob of interconnected dark blue lines, but did nothing to communicate the intricacies of how to actually get between any two places.
That was our starting point.
How do you represent such a vast network, and make it make sense in a way that customers can quickly and easily understand?
Using Emoji to Depict Train Delays
It’s a single animated map in a larger, infographic-rich Bloomberg CityLab article about how NJ Transit is the least reliable New York City area commuter rail service, but you can’t help but pay attention to a map that uses emoji to indicate how late a train is. Surprisingly effective, though I doubt transit agencies would be brave enough to adopt it for themselves. The Intercity Rail Map uses colours (green, yellow, red, black) to indicate lateness, but the icons indicate train number so you couldn’t swap them out for emoji, more’s the pity. [Maps Mania]
New York City Subway Map Gets a Complete Makeover
New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has announced the first major redesign of its system map since 1979. The new map adopts a diagrammatic style, in common with most other transit maps around the world, for the first time since Massimo Vignelli’s controversial (and ultimately abandoned) 1972 map. Indeed, the MTA is openly acknowledging the influence of Vignelli’s design, along with the colours from the replacement maps designed by Michael Hertz.
The new map was designed by the MTA’s Creative Services Mapping Department and, like many major subway systems around the world, utilizes a diagrammatic style, employing bold, straight lines making it much easier for the eye to follow and more suitable for digital users. The white background, bold colors, horizontal writing and use of black dots make the map more ADA-friendly and easier for people with low-vision or cognitive disabilities to read.
Designers also focused on text legibility, keeping text on one line wherever possible and making better use of open space to alleviate crowding and using a black subway bullet with a white character to provide maximum contrast for easier reading.
This isn’t a complete surprise: the MTA started testing a map similar to this one in a few stations back in 2021.
I’ll be very interested to see how this new map will be received. The design of the New York subway map has been contentious for as long as I’ve been alive. Will it continue to be?
Book Roundup: December 2024
A lack of time and energy have conspired to prevent me from serving up a gift guide this year, but I can point you to a few links related to books that have come out this year.
First up, I have in my hands a review copy of the seventh volume of the Atlas of Design. It is the usual collection of marvellous cartography from familiar and unfamiliar mapmakers, some of which quite unexpected, and I hope to have more to say about it shortly. It made its debut at the NACIS annual meeting in October and is available to purchase from this page. See my review of the sixth volume.
Matthew Edney’s list of map history books published or seen in 2024 is now live; he’s been posting such a list each year since 2017 (previously).
40 Maps, 47 Borders, 50 Transit Maps
Alaistair Bonnett’s latest, 40 Maps That Will Change How You See the World came out in September from Ivy Press. Geographical magazine published an interview with him in October. I’ve reviewed two of Bonnett’s books here before—Off the Map (Unruly Places) and The Age of Islands (Elsewhere)—which were more about geographical curiosities than maps per se. Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
To promote A History of the World in 47 Borders (Wildfire, April)—published in the U.S. as A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders (The Experiment, October)—Jonn Elledge has posted a list of the 47 facts about the 47 borders that are the focus of the book’s 47 chapters. Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
Mark Ovenden’s latest, Iconic Transit Maps (Prestel, 2024) is a look at transit map design via fifty examples around the world. Cameron Booth reviews it on his Transit Maps blog. Way back in 2008, I reviewed the first edition of his Transit Maps of the World. Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
Related: Map Books of 2024.
Passenger Rail’s Decline in the U.S. and Canada
The decline in passenger rail service in the U.S. and Canada is charted by this interactive map, which uses a slider to compare Amtrak and Via Rail service in 1980 with what it is today. [Maps Mania]
The Truth About Harry Beck: A Play About the Tube Map’s Creator
The Truth About Harry Beck, a play about the designer of London’s iconic Tube map, is at the London Transport Museum’s Cubic Theatre through January. Writer and director Andy Burden spent years working on the play. So far reviews have been mostly positive: Theatre Vibe’s Lizzie Loveridge found it “charming,” Everything Theatre “warm,” and Broadway World calls it “as reassuring as a comfy pair of slippers,” whereas The Arts Desk’s take is more mixed and The Standard dismisses it as “chock-full of mugging, direct address and chuntering dimwittery.” BBC News coverage.
Not coincidentally, it’s the 50th anniversary of Beck’s death. London map dealer The Map House has an exhibition to mark the anniversary: Mapping the Tube: 1863-2023. They’re a map dealer so the displays are for sale, including a draft copy of the map and one of only five remaining first-edition Tube map posters. Runs from 25 October to 30 November, free admission.
The NJ Transit App Is Apparently Terrible
The Verge’s Victoria Song moved from New York City to New Jersey and discovered the awfulness of the NJ Transit app.
Many of my friends who’d migrated to Jersey warned me about the NJ Transit app. It’s not good, they said. I didn’t take them too seriously. I was forged in the fires of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s continually broken website circa 2001. After a seven-year stint in Tokyo navigating the labyrinthian Tokyo subway and bus system, what public transit app could ever befuddle me?
Hubris is a bitch.
(It’s reportedly okay for trains; the bus—which is what she’s taking—seems to be Another Matter.)
Live North American Passenger Train Map
trains.fyi maps the real-time locations of North American passenger trains: Amtrak and Via Rail, plus a few commuter lines, based on their GPS tracking data. [Maps Mania]
The Lost Subways of North America
The Lost Subways of North America, in which Jake Berman looks at the successes and failures of 23 North American transit systems, is out now from the University of Chicago Press. The book’s text is accompanied by a hundred or so of Berman’s own maps, and is based on his series of maps of discontinued and proposed subway systems: see the online index for what made it into the book. On his blog, Berman is posting “deleted scenes”: city chapters that were cut from the book for length, like Denver and Portland.
See the Guardian’s interview with Berman (thanks, Michael); the Strong Towns interview focuses specifically on Los Angeles.
Urban Caffeine on the NYC Subway Map
“I remember the first time I saw the New York City subway map. I called an Uber.” On her Urban Caffeine channel, Thea looks at the oft-maligned, controversial and complicated New York subway map. Her take is informed by her experience growing up in pre-GPS, pre-Google Maps Manila, which she frankly found easier to navigate; by contrast, she finds New York’s map too cluttered and information-dense and more in tune with the needs of New Yorkers than visitors and tourists.
New York and Philadelphia Regional Rail Networks on One Map
Here’s a rail network map that shows the commuter rail lines of both New York City and Philadelphia. It’s by Evelyn Ivy, who explains on Mastodon that it took six months of work to complete. “Showing five different commuter rail systems (#CTRail, #MetroNorth, #LIRR, #NJTransit, and #SEPTA), this map depicts everywhere a passenger can get to by train from NYC or Philadelphia without using Amtrak.” (The keys are Trenton and New Haven, where you can hop from one system to the next.)
Upcoming Leventhal Exhibition Will Explore Boston Transit Maps
An upcoming exhibition at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center, Getting Around Town: Four Centuries of Mapping Boston in Transit, “brings together an extraordinary collection of maps, plans, ephemera, and other materials to investigate how Bostonians have moved around the city in the past, present, and future.” Opens September 9 and runs until April 27, 2024. Free admission.
Geographical on the NYC Subway Map Debate
Geographical magazine has a short history of the New York City subway map and its controversies. This has been a fraught and hotly contested topic for most of the last 50 years, and Jules Stewart’s article can’t go into nearly enough depth to capture it all, but it could serve as a decent entry point for those not in the know. Drawing rather heavily on the expertise of Peter Lloyd (previously), Stewart covers the subject from the first subway maps to where the MTA goes from here.
Previously: A Naïve Look at New York’s Subway Map.
European Night Train Network Map
Night train advocacy group Back on Track has a map showing the current network of European night trains offered by various train operators. It’s colour coded by operator, but individual lines are a bit hard to follow, and using various dashed lines for both less-than-daily service and forthcoming service is a bit confusing. Then again, given the sharp uptick of night train services being offered, it’s almost unavoidable that any map of this sort will be a bit of a jumble: compare with Jug Cerović’s version (previously) to see what I mean.