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.