The Art of the Transit Map

Cameron Booth runs a wonderful blog on designing maps of transit systems. He posts all kinds of transit maps---historical, current, imaginative---and writes reviews of them. I've still only gone through maybe the first ten of 109 pages worth of the maps on his blog, but it's great to see the creativity at work in these designs. For example, I find this map of Rio de Janeiro's rail and bus lines that Pedro Guedes, a reader of the Transit Maps blog submitted, to be particularly fun:

Check out the full post on this map here

If you compare Pedro's with the official Rio map, which Pedro notes is pretty hideous, you can see the artistic license Pedro has taken in his schematization:

The Official Rio Map

While we're still in the data gathering phase on our project, it's great to already be looking at the kinds of maps that people are making to see the different methods for displaying transit information. In the map of Pedro's above, I personally really like the schematized orange loop, and Cameron in his review notes that it gives the map a distinctive design element, something he looks for in a map.

The other day, Eric noted that while Amman's bus and servees networks do cover a substantial amount of the city, there are still large portions which are underserved by busses, meaning that often a trip will need to begin or finish off with a short taxi ride. Because of that, he was saying that our map should be more geographically faithful than the schematized maps that people often prefer if you're just trying to show clarity in getting from stop to stop in a subway car or bus. Eric brings up an important, Amman-specific point, and it'll be interesting to play around with different forms to find the right balance between geographical fidelity and clarity.

Many of Cameron's posts are just highly practical for map designers. For example, I was wondering how we would show one-directionality, because many of Amman's busses and taxis travel either in loops or in different one-direction segments. If you just draw a line on the map to show the route (like I have currently in my draft of the map), it will definitely communicate the wrong idea that you can take that same route in both directions. Cameron's answer is that you'll have to use arrows to show directionality (there aren't a lot of other options), but you can do that in a number of ways:

From transitmaps.tumblr.com

Of those six examples, I like all of them except the upper right and upper left, and to have someone providing these kinds of examples and guidance will be of great assistance in our design process. Hopefully we can even submit a draft of our map and get his feedback.