Middle Earth Transit Map

Hard to believe that those dumb hobbits risked their lives walking all the way to Mordor when they could have just taken the Orange Line. 

Oh wait, the tunnel under the mountain is closed 

so they would have had to switch to the Red Line at Bree and then made another transfer to get to Mount Doom. 

Still that seems like a minor inconvenience when compared to risking imprisonment by nasty spider. The Middle Earth Transit Map ("One does not simply walk") was created by Don Wilde Art. He also has a nice set of travel posters.

You can explore the map on Reddit.

The Lost Subways of North America

A new book by Jake Berman, The Lost Subways of North America explores the history of unbuilt and discontinued transit in 23 cities in the United States and Canada. Mexico is not included because "Mexico's urban history is so unlike that of the United States and Canada." 

Cities are divided into four categories, pre-automobile, automobile era, Canadian cities (they mostly avoided downtown freeways and followed a different urban pattern) and smaller systems of historic interest such as Rochester, the only city (known to the author) to build a subway and then abandon it. The book contains many maps drawn by the author using "period-influenced design and typography". Berman set up a website where you can view and purchase these maps. Here is one example showing the 1945 New Orleans streetcar network with a fake ad for war bonds.

Here is an example of Cleveland's proposed downtown loop which was never completely constructed. "The bonds were issued, and the voters approved, but the County Engineer did as much work as possible to make sure that highways were built instead." 

The current system maps are shown with a more modern looking design.

Look for your favorite transit system here.

Earth Transit

 Earth Transit is a project by Zhaoxu Sui showing the major passenger rail lines of the world.

In his own words "This is the beta version, which means a lot of errors and mistakes could be on the map, please give me corrections and suggestions so that I can improve." Lines are color coded by railway companies. The ambition of this is huge and at this scale it is not possible to show all railway lines in places as dense as Europe,

or maybe China.

There is not an obvious link but you can download a high resolution image by clicking on the picture and saving it or from this link. It's fun (for people like me anyway) to pan around and see what the railway network looks like in places like Central Asia (nice mountains!),

southern Africa,

 and Cuba.

Here are the railways I know and love in my part of North America.

More on the project here. Enjoy!

America's First Subway Map

The first subway in the United States was built in Boston. The tunnel ran along Tremont Street,  a chaotic mess of streetcars, horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians. The tunnel was built to route the streetcars underground to ease congestion. Here is a plan of the original subway tunnels.

via Leventhal Map Center

The plan involved building a tunnel from North Station to the Boston Public Garden with two portals (where the streetcars emerge from underground) at the southwest end, one at the public garden and another along Tremont Street a few blocks south of the Boylston Street Station. 

This detail shows the latter of those portals, the Pleasant Street portal. Green lines indicate above ground sections while red lines are underground.

The streets in many parts of this plan are unrecognizable as they have fallen victim to various rounds of urban redevelopment. This portal was discontinued in 1962 and was buried underground. The disused tunnel still exists. Here is a detail of Boylston Station showing how the line to the south has to make its way underneath the line that curves to the west (west is up on this plan) making a sub-subway.

A plan showing the progress as of August 15, 1897 (a couple of weeks before its opening) is available from Boston in Transit.

The legend on this map is complicated and hard to translate but the text gives an idea of when various sections were completed.

These subway tunnels are still in use today, part of the MBTA Green Line. For a while this was part of my daily commute to work. The old tunnels are a bit claustrophobic and creepy but they still work!

The Grand Paris Express

I was recently in Harvard University's Graduate School of Design (GSD) when I came across this fantastic exhibit on the Grand Paris Express. The GPE is a hugely ambitious project to add several metro ring lines connecting the suburbs of Paris to each other and to the central city. It will be 90% underground and consist of 200 km of new rail lines and 68 new stations.

Map via STM

Construction began in 2016 and is planned to be completed by 2030. The new lines are shown in white on this image from the exhibit.

The project won the GSD's Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design. "The overarching goal of GPE is to challenge the current monocentric model of Paris and create an open-ended megalopolis by radically changing existing patterns of circulation and decentering Paris itself." The project's ambitions go well beyond simply building 68 new stations. There has also been a huge effort to design these stations to be artistic, consider the flow and mood of spaces as you move from the street down towards the train platforms and to reflect the localities of each station. Here is a 3D model of the Noisy-Champs station.

Here is part of a "landscape strategy" map showing the types of terrain the new stations will be located underneath.

This map of "Sensoriality" is difficult to understand.

Even after figuring out the French, the legend is still almost impossible decipher,

and even more difficult to pick up from the map detail.

This map shows how the lines will serve the lower income (lighter colored) areas,

and another one shows areas where housing is overcrowded.

The increase in access to jobs is shown here. I left off the legend for formatting purposes but the darkest circles will have a more than 150% increase in access by 2030.

Here is one showing "urban momentum" highlighting housing construction projects that the project has spawned. The blue buildings are the larger projects.

Finally from the exhibit, a maps showing new areas (darker lines) that will be walking distance to a metro station.

The graph in the lower right corner is a bit hard to decipher from my poor photography but it tells an interesting story of transportation. Basically, pink is walking, yellow is various forms of transit starting with the horse and green are cars. The time period runs from about 1810 to 1930 and you can see the rapid rise and predicted decline in car use in favor of transit, bicycling and various other forms of mobility.

 One major issue, only briefly addressed by this exhibit is that Paris will be hosting the Olympics next summer. I think the plan is to have the parts of lines 15, 16 and 17 that serve the stadium and Olympic Village finished in time. Here's a map of Line 16 from the GPE web page.

Unfortunately this exhibit ends March 31st so if you want to see it live hurry up. Hopefully they keep the online exhibit up for a while.

A Critique of the New SEPTA Map

A recent article in Bloomberg discusses how SEPTA, Philadelphia's transit authority is trying to improve wayfinding including creating a new map with new nomenclature. While most of you probably don't care about SEPTA, I navigate this system almost every time I visit my Mom so this is personal.

The system is very difficult to map, complicated by subways, both elevated and underground, commuter trains, buses and various types or trolleys, some running along streets, others with their own dedicated rights of way. Additional complications come from the many different agencies that run lines through the area such as Amtrak, PATCO and New Jersey Transit. While trying not to go full negadelphia on here, the more I look at this map the less I like it. 

 

My first big complaint is this triple line representation. It creates a lot of unneeded visual clutter to just show local and express routes separately. The current map. does just fine with one line.

I'm also not impressed with the new nomenclature. Naming lines based on the county they serve M1, D1, etc seems arbitrary, especially given how county lines cut across otherwise uniform suburban areas. Then using "T" for trolley lines, but giving the Girard Avenue trolley a separate letter and color? I could go on a rant about the "L" for what used to be the "MFL" too but I'll spare you. Also, there's an "L" bus line to add to the confusion. Why doesn't PATCO get a letter designation? Finally, is it really necessary to have G1, L1 if there is only one line? I would remove the "1" to keep it simpler.

Also, notice the mess created at 69th St Station by separating local and express lines.

The complete lack of visual prominence of the heavily used regional rail lines is also not good. I get how they create a lot of clutter on the current map but they went too far the other way. I'm OK with making the more frequent rail lines more prominent but one of the problems here is that the less prominent lines are almost indistinguishable from the seemingly random* occasional street. See how the width changes at Penn Medicine** below and then compare the thin line below it with Spruce Street.

Getting back to the multiple line representation, take a look at how it makes the green subway-surface lines way more prominent. I don't know what the ridership data shows but I usually think of the blue line as being the most used/important line here.

A few more complaints before I finish. The wheelchair accessible symbols are almost invisibly small. They want to show accommodations for disabilities while making it hard on those with vision issues. Does the "express sports special service" really need a separate line given how infrequently it runs? I also don't like how tiny the dots are on the non-transfer subway stops.

I'm all for changing the map and even the line names where it makes sense but so far this new map is not an improvement. I hope they can get to something better.

* I understand why they chose the streets they did to include but by only having a couple of non-transit streets, it gives those decisions a random feel.

** I could really go on a rant about corporate station names but that is a decision SEPTA made without consulting me. Jefferson Station is particularly bad as the name says little about its location to anyone not very familiar with that part of town. This is also one of the busiest and most tourist-y. stations in the city. Also, if you're visiting from out of town and want to see your sports team (most likely) beat us, you're just supposed to know to head to "nrg"

Transit Tokens of the World

This is a map that I started about two years ago but got interrupted by various events including a global pandemic. I saw a bunch of old tokens for sale in a store, including one for Rockford, Illinois that I bought for a friend from there.

Upon further research I discovered a whole world of these things online and made a map of them. You can move around and click on a token to see a bigger image. 

This is a worldwide phenomenon though most of the tokens are from the United States.

Some notes about this project:

Most of these are bus tokens, the Midwest seems to be very fertile ground for these.

The larger cities have multiple tokens. I tried to choose the most "rapid" form of transit, for example subway over bus, and also use tokens from the "classic" era (the golden age of transit-in the U.S. approximately mid-20th Century). There are three city transit systems I have a lot of experience with, making those decisions a little more personal. For Boston, a city where I was a subway commuter for a few years I chose the tokens that I actually used on a daily basis. For Philadelphia, though it was tempting to use the SEPTA tokens that I used often in the 1980's and 90's, I went with a more "classic" look. For New York I used what I think of as the classic NYC token with the hole in the Y.

European tokens are very hard to come by and I suspect that most of those systems used some kind of ticket instead of a token. The token from Paris has a nice map on it but is a 50th Anniversary collectible that was probably not used for an normal admission.

I could not find tokens for many other European cities that I know have good subway systems. Most of the European ones are from former Soviet Union republics.

Asia has some very strangely colorful tokens. Possibly plastic?

Click here to explore. If anyone has other tokens they want added to this project, please send them along!

Detroit's Urban and Interurban Charms

Before becoming the nation's center of auto manufacturing, Detroit had an extensive urban and regional transit system. The Detroit United Railway, a consolidation of various streetcar and regional railways produced some gorgeous panoramic maps.

via Reddit

A version of this 1920 map from the David Rumsey Map Collection allows you to zoom way in and really see the nice details.

This version only has the panoramic map section. Another version on Reddit shows the whole map complete with the title block,

and descriptions of the points of interest and "nature's interurban charms."

Here's the view from Port Huron spotlighting some more rural parts of the region and a nice title block.

A less panoramic, but still charming map of the entire system area from 1913 can be found and purchased on Cameron Booth's Transit Maps web site. The above map is also for sale there.

I like the ships and fonts.

While you're vacationing through the interurban charms of southeastern Michigan, you may want to stay at the Hotel Fort Wayne. It is conveniently located at the cirner of Cass & Temple in the middle of everything as this map (via Detroitography) shows.

A zoomed in view shows the proximity to the theaters, transit and City Hall