What are your favourite transport maps?
As a railfan and a graphic designer, the first thing I check out when in a new town with public transit is their transit map. You can tell a lot about a city by how they represent themselves on a transit map, and I myself have designed more maps than I can count. What's the map of your city look like? Do you have a personal favourite you think is really unknown? Any maps that you just want to rant about because of how terrible it is?
My personal favourite transit map is Constantine Konovalov's Paris Metro Map, I just love how effortlessly it weaves the lines throughout the Peripherique, and how it's not afraid to break its own established rules on angles and circles. Honorable mentions go to the London Tube and Rail map (an absolute classic), and the Mexico City Metro, which assigns a unique symbol to every station for the benefit of passengers who can't read or write.
Also, designers, feel free to share your transit diagrams! I miss r/transitdiagrams a lot and would love to see your work, fictional, redesign or otherwise!
A bit offtopic but a few videos from Jay Foreman about London Tube maps that I think are relevant here:
The Tube Map nearly looked very different
What went wrong with the Tube Map?
The transport map for Berlin’s subway and light rail network is very easy to use and the stations are very close to their actual locations, so estimating walking distance works: https://www.bvg.de/dam/jcr:60a89e3b-f88d-4d48-b8a6-98ab340ada05/S+U-Bahn_04_2023-Internetversion-BVG.pdf
It’s not particularly beautiful, but the map is super easy to use as a route planner. I think more people in Berlin have this thing hanging in their home than any other map.
I think it's quite beautiful, thanks for sharing! Then again I think circuit boards are beautiful too, so obviously my tastes are somewhat divergent.
Still hoping to visit Berlin someday.
Highkey agree about the Berlin metro map being great for route planning (though it's worth noting that it includes trams and some regional trains in addition to the subway and light rail!) I think if it were too beautiful it would be less useful and very un-Berlin -- this is not a city for those overly concerned with beauty!
I've always liked this version of the Copenhagen metro map. As a lapsed graphic designer, I find the red circle very sexy.
Have you seen this unofficial version of the Copenhagen public transport map?
I can't put my finger on why, but I don't like the names going into the sea. Other than that, it's quite cute!
I think it'd be more useful if all the station labels were flat.
Slightly off topic from your question, but I'm a big fan of isochrone maps, and I've been obsessed with using them in my open source projects. These maps show the geographic area that can be traveled to within certain time intervals. With modern open source tools, creating these maps is pretty easy.
What's really cool is that they're actually a pretty old concept. Here one of my favorites, a 1910 map of travel times in Melbourne, Australia by train.
And here's a demo site where you can make your own.
I love this, thanks! I like to walk in my local area and the odd time I've come across an isochrone map they have been very useful in identifying places I could get to but haven't yet. I could.never remember the term "isochrone" though and none of the sites I found were as nice as this version.
Glasgow underground map is the best! Not hard to make it nice when it's just a circle, but whatever.
I really like the Moscow metro map - the circle makes it visually pleasing and it's made very clear where different lines intersect. The inclusion of the river to give some geographical context is nice as well.
I also like this version of the Sydney metro map. Something about the contrast between the detail of the coastline and the abstractness of the train lines just hits the spot for me.
It isn't world class or anything, but the local bus network in Salisbury, England has this map - unfortunately I can't find a high-resolution digital copy, but that link should give you the general idea. These maps are present (in quite a large form!) within bus stops in Salisbury.
I (of course) like the colour-coded lines, but being a bus service I also really appreciate that they've put some labelled roads on there. With e.g. the London Underground, one thing it (by necessity) lacks is much in the way of reference points - you have to know the name of the stop you're looking for, and unless you have prior knowledge you have very little idea how the map actually relates to locations in London.
But I also just appreciate it because it's for such a small city of only around 40 000 people. Naturally it's for tourists as much as locals, but even so I think it's really nice to have this level of graphic thoughtfulness for smaller areas as well as the biggest cities! And I could be wrong, but I think it's quite unusual in doing so - in most similar places you just have to rely on Google Maps and such, with nothing in the way of well-presented network information beyond a timetable for whichever stop you're at.