I wish I'd had this when last I was in Rotterdam (back in April, during my honeymoon). I have been to Rotterdam twice, the first time by taking what is now the E line from The Hague. At the time, the line didn't have its underground section yet. It was the only time I've ever seen farmers and sheep from a subway train.
It looks like the Mongrel Maps are just the fingerprint smear tool from a simple photo editor. That doesn't make it a bad tool, but this interpretation of its results assumes that things I would love to know more about the MIT team's methods for assessing user processing of map. Did they watch a person's neural responses and compare them to eye movements? Did they simply assume the Mongrel is accurate? I lived in Boston for a dozen years and watched as the T map evolved. It has added hierarchy to the map, one that oddly reflects the racial realities of the city. Notice the Silver Line smudges out of existence on either Mongrel map. The article mentions this, but does not try to make any deeper conclusions. The Silver Line is a light gray, made to hide behind the 'superior' train-based lines. The Silver Line uses articulated buses with on-board fare collection along Washington Street to replace an elevated train line through black neighborhoods. back in the 1980s they moved the Orange Line, the former el, more than a mile to the west so that it serves Jamaica Plain instead of Roxbury. Hmmm... By the way, that circular route connecting the Washington Street (southern portion) of the Silver Line to the part that goes to Logan Airport (the eastern portion)? That's not real. They're separate systems (complete with separate power systems). We don't want the white folks to have an accident and wind up south of Mass Pike, now do we? Not with all their nice luggage on those special racks. Note that MIT is along the Red Line in Cambridge (between the Kendall and Central Square stops). Notice how the line is made obvious on the northwestern side of the route (short, simple). Now consider how the branch to Dorchester and Mattapan (black neighborhoods, the latter a former Jewish neighborhood) remains relatively clear but fractures much more on the branch to Quincy (a working class Irish suburb that has become an Asian neighborhood) and Braintree (the park and ride lot to the South Shore commuters and some Hispanic suburbs). Layers upon layers... I've stirred enough of my emotions by looking at the racism in the Boston T map. If we move back to the article's romance with Vignelli's 1972, we notice no picture of that map -- only the revisions used on the MTA web site. We see a lot of browns and yellows, a 1980 bag of peanut M&Ms with a modern blue candy. Even the red trunk (7th Ave IRT, aka 1/2/3) isn't the primary red found on the signs and in stations. The New Yorker article opens with a screen shot from the midtown Manhattan part of Vignetti's original map: Notice the cacaphony of colors? Notice the pink-puce-yellow for the Lexington IRT (4-5-6) instead of the modern green? Notice your mind drift to the opening credits of The Electric Company from PBS? Notice how you wince? Yeah, Central Park looks square and gray, as if it were what we now consider an unloaded image file. However that isn't the only reason people hated this map. They couldn't use it! Here is an amazing article about the hybrids that have evolved. This includes a great hybrid, the Kick Map, with a comparison for downtown Brooklyn: It's nice to think of a golden age of.. well, anything. Tea Baggers love to imagine a golden age where white men got their way but stayed in the closet. Some gay folks reminisce on the bath houses of the 1970s, when anonymous sex was guaranteed (and let's face it, who wouldn't love that for at least a couple weeks?). Each tunes out the problems that went with the time. Vignelli still feels he was short-changed by the 1979 revision. He has less standing than a 1980s band on Homestead or SST Records that still hasn't been paid for albums that maaagically appear in mint condition on eBay. A map is not purely about elegance: it has to serve. If a tourist cannot look at a map and say "oh, I'm here and I can do that to that to get where the other thing is" in a short time, then the map fails. A transit map is a service, a commercial product -- not an in-joke. I wonder whether Vignelli hates Google Maps for lack of colors. I hate their lack of boundary lines and the poor distinction between road qualities.
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I feel like this approach, while interesting and informative, is missing the mark. What makes the Vignelli map so reviled? I don't think it had anything to do with how things appeared in your peripheral vision. Focusing on that (hah) is ignoring the main purpose of a map: to display geographical layouts and connectivity. Obviously the Vignelli map does not show geographical layouts in anything but the most abstract manner, so it fails in that metric. If the geographical shape of the actual subway lines is so confusing as to inhibit your travel, interpreting the subway map is the least of your worries. In fact, having the proper geometry hidden by your map will only compound your confusion. It's not like you can hold your typical street map up next to the Vignelli subway map and quickly figure out where you are. What the Vignelli map tried to do was strip out all extraneous information to make interpretation simpler. The geography was not extraneous. What it focused on was connectivity, but ever there it fails. The Vignelli map is completely misleading about connectivity. If you were to look at any modern subway map you notice a trend that probably owes a lot to the Vignelli map: lines travel together in "bands" to show identical routes. You can assume that all the lines on a band hit the same stations and follow the same tunnel. Here's the kicker though: on the Vignelli map they don't. You might assume from the map that all the red lines hit the same 34St station, but that's a lie. They hit 3 stations spread apart by many blocks. Maps and other infographics have one primary objective: to present information clearly and honestly. Putting any other aim above that objective will betray the graphic and weaken it.
You're almost right. Subway and other route maps are controversial because they sacrifice intermodal navigability in exchange for intramodal navigability. In other words, a subway map is great for telling you how to get from the Red Line's northern terminus to the Blue Line's hub at Long Beach Airport. It sucks ass at telling you how to get from Burbank and Tujunga to LGB. People rarely need to get from subway point to subway point. They need to get from, say, "Macy's" to "John's housewarming." According to the subway map, John's new house is a quarter inch from the A street station and a half inch from the E street station. Except you happen to know that John moved to E street and that if you got off on A street you'd have to walk three miles - since the space between A and E streets is uninteresting to Metro (they have no stops) they condense it down to nothing. One of the best things I did when I moved to LA was buy two Thomas Guides, a crapton of foamcore and two cans of spray glue. I then carved up those Thomas Guides so that I had a map of Greater LA covering one entire wall of my living room. It was marvelous. It was probably 11 feet by 7 feet. I put pins wherever my friends lived. I put pins in restaurants I went to, stores I frequented. And I got me some embroidery thread and I laid out the Metro lines. It allowed me to make sense of Metro in a context of the city - because the Metro map gives you a sense that all of LA is covered: ...when in fact there are vast, unreachable swaths: So when you see just the Metro map, you're making false assumptions. If you know where you're going and you look at a Metro map, you know it's wrong. But if you look at a Metro map and aren't quite sure of your surroundings, that map is betraying you. Interestingly enough, it was a stone cold bitch finding the Metro stations on my Thomas Guide. People looking at street maps are rarely interested in subway terminals. Very few mapping systems take into account all the things we will use them for and consequently distort the "useless" (to them) data in favor of their focus.
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I love my Thomas Guide. I bought one in Barstow during my drive from Boston to West Hollywood two years ago. Compared to its Boston equivalent (the Arrow Metro Boston guide), it's a feat of engineering and subtle history. My complaint with Vignetti's classic map (and even with its subtle victory as the Weekender map on the MTA web site) is similar to everyone else's: lack of context. Nevertheless he created the new paradigm, one we still consider vital to transit maps: marking lines as trunks and station features with obvious clarity, use of non-serifed but bold fonts to make reading easy at a distance, use of the IND's clear delineation of local (double-letter), express (single-letter), and rush hour (diamond instead of circle) identifiers throughout a purposefully redundant system. He was rebelling against the horrible maps of the 1950s and 1960s, which used curves and only three colors to convey information poorly and still based on "this is IRT, this is BMT, this is IND". If you haven't seen those maps, here is an example from just after the 1964 World's Fair. Also his original map had gaudy, non-contextual choices for colors. We can be grateful he had to modify even before being dropped. Mapmaking is an evolving process. The move from hot wax and Letraset to desktop publishing via computer to scalable graphics that never get printed has been dramatic. Suddenly we can have every layer of a real-time map, then decide which levels we need, then again decide what gets lost in which level (because we can never convey everything or nothing becomes important enough to convey). By the way, are you still here in LA?
That horrible world's fair example looks like the LA Metro map, only beige. You know your maps. That's awesome. I geek out on them but cartographer I ain't. I'm in Playa Del Rey. It's as close to Seattle as you can get in the LA Basin. I left my apartment in North Hollywood for the last time and took off my shoes in my apartment in PDR for the first time on August 31, 2009. NoHo was 108 and PDR was 72.
I think the LA Metro map is meant to make you think three things: 1) There is nothing on the west side of the city (for non-Angelinos: this is like saying there is nothing to see on the Left Bank of Paris or that Rio is just a statue of Christ on a mountain); 2) It's no big deal to take mass transit from LAX to the rest of the city (Ha! If I drive from West Hollywood down Fairfax to La Cienega to La Tijera it's 30 minutes, but it's more than two hours by express bus because I have to go downtown first -- instead of due south, it's way east then south west); 3) There are reasons to go downtown (if you like cocktails or you want to visualize Raymond Chandler novels, yes; if you want dinner, entertainment, or shopping -- very no). Interstate 405 is one of the busiest expressways in the Western hemisphere. It doesn't just run north and south through the west side: it becomes a wall and makes Sepulveda into Unter den Liden (the fashionable street that was turned into land mines and barbed wire by the Berlin Wall). For some reason, there are NO PLANS AT ALL NOPE NONE to run an express transit line along it. The Expo Line (aka "the Streetcar to the Sea") will get to Santa Monica in two years and already goes halfway (from downtown to the northernmost part of Culver City). In ten years, the Purple Line will get to... maybe Westwood (if they stop asking Beverly Hills for permission and run the dang thing to Pico & Robertson instead). However the Sepulveda Pass has a potential, a vague maybe, for a bus. Grrrrr. Santa Monica & Fairfax should be the Union Square of midtown.
There is a full history of how this map was simplified repeatedly. If you need proof, look at this pre-Overground map to scale and this semi-scale map of the modern system. Epping (the present eastern terminus of the Central Line) and Heathrow (the western loop of the Picadilly Line) are a long ways away from London. Heathrow is about 35 miles from central London. I'm a horrible subway junky. I've been collecting maps since I was 9 (I'm 38).
It's how I learned to use the reference section of the library, how I learned to write "please send me a copy of your subway map" in a few languages when you had to send mail to transit agencies, and how I sublimated my undiagnosed OCD until puberty. When I wasn't staring at subway maps, I was drawing them with color pencils. To this day I love mass transit networks, streetcars and subways especially. I've been living in Los Angeles for two years, where the network is growing and the results are rather nice. Next week I get to visit New York for the first time in a few years. I plan to ride the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail as well as some ferries, along with the oldest parts of the Brooklyn IRT down Nostrand (2/5) as well as the entire G (slow as molasses).
God I adore subway systems (complex infrastructure systems in general as well). I had the fortune of visiting Paris with my highschool. I was more fascinated by the RATP's amazing fine-grain network. Even helped the teachers with finding the best routes on the network. In two months I'll be going to Hong Kong, can't wait to see MTR's system!
The MTR trains are supposed to be mind-blowing! They're completely articulated so that the entire train can be evacuated without obstruction. I've seen footage and it's almost sexy. Have a great time! I've been on a crazy number of systems on three continents. From the tiny VAL in Rennes to the networks upon networks in Paris; from the sprawl of New York City to the clumsy but almost personal Buffalo system. Each has a reason to love it, from age and grace to sleekness and efficiency.
I will always have a special place in my heart for Toronto's system, as it was the first one I rode and it started the addiction. It has a great integration of subway to tram and bus, with intermodal stations all over the system. The stations are not that interesting, but they got good artists to do murals. Montreal's stations can be a bit run-down (or at least dated), but it's an even more efficient system in a city that doesn't normally do thing efficiently. There are no stations above ground, which is vital for a city that gets a lot of snow. Stations are well-enclosed so you never feel stifled or frozen. (I hated that about the otherwise wonderful Lille system: the stations were cold but the trains had no ventilation so you froze-sweated-froze. There's no worse feeling than drippy sweat freezing into your clothing as you return to the surface.) One of my favorite stations in the world is Lionel-Groulx in Montreal. It's a transfer station. Instead of putting one line upstairs and another downstairs, they put all the "eastbound" and "westbound" trains on the same level. Thus the typical commuter crosses the platform to change to a different trunk line in the same direction, rather than jamming the escalators. Too bad the station is named for an anti-Semitic priest. Philadelphia has one of the worst systems. It's the most bureaucratic transit process I've ever seen. Where is the station entrance? Okay, now where are the signs to tell me I'm on the right path to the turnstiles? When last I visited in 2006, I had to deal with two people at different booths in the same station to get a two-day pass (which was made from paper-towel with a punch hole and a decal placed over it). They had stations with tracks buried in dirt. London is fascinating for its layers of cruft. You can see the priorities over time by seeing what gets modernized and what is just good enough. Compare the very modern stations on some of the oldest railroad viaducts in the world in the up-and-coming Hackney area along what is now the London Overground. They're bright and inviting for a place people didn't want to be caught dead thirty years ago. Meanwhile the staid and wealthy Russell Square still has two deep elevators (much like Clark Street station in Brooklyn Heights) that still do not lead to a handicapped-accessible platform. If you have luggage, get off at King's Cross and walk. New York City and Boston have ancient signal equipment. Boston has ancient equipment in general, with the section of the green line along Boylston Street hosting track that expects a small tram at 6 MPH instead of articulated beasts that would rather go 50. However Boston's system has so much history to it, and its cantankerous squeaks and sloppiness suit the city. I miss ringing the tubular bells with the swinging pendula hammers at Kendall, almost as much as I miss the trail of bronze gloves from the street to the deep tracks at Porter. I even miss the Brutalist stations in Malden on the northern end of the Orange Line. I still haven't been on any German or Russian systems. I want to visit Berlin, the system that got split then put back together. I love Brussels, even though it's a beat-up set of strangely related metro and tram lines. It's hard to resist getting every type of interchange along with half a kilometer of the best graffiti on Earth (and a Chinese pagoda from the 1935 World's Fair across from a dentist's shop).
:( I'll try to find a contact link and message them. Thats no bueno.