Category: Transit

The Truth About Harry Beck: A Play About the Tube Map’s Creator

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Cover image from The Truth About Harry Beck, a play now on at the London Transport Museum. It’s an outline cutout image of Beck with the London Underground map in the back.

The Truth About Harry Beck, a play about the designer of London’s iconic Tube map, is at the London Transport Museum’s Cubic Theatre through January. Writer and director Andy Burden spent years working on the play. So far reviews have been mostly positive: Theatre Vibe’s Lizzie Loveridge found it “charming,” Everything Theatre “warm,” and Broadway World calls it “as reassuring as a comfy pair of slippers,” whereas The Arts Desk’s take is more mixed and The Standard dismisses it as “chock-full of mugging, direct address and chuntering dimwittery.” BBC News coverage.

Not coincidentally, it’s the 50th anniversary of Beck’s death. London map dealer The Map House has an exhibition to mark the anniversary: Mapping the Tube: 1863-2023. They’re a map dealer so the displays are for sale, including a draft copy of the map and one of only five remaining first-edition Tube map posters. Runs from 25 October to 30 November, free admission.

The NJ Transit App Is Apparently Terrible

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Verge’s Victoria Song moved from New York City to New Jersey and discovered the awfulness of the NJ Transit app.

Many of my friends who’d migrated to Jersey warned me about the NJ Transit app. It’s not good, they said. I didn’t take them too seriously. I was forged in the fires of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s continually broken website circa 2001. After a seven-year stint in Tokyo navigating the labyrinthian Tokyo subway and bus system, what public transit app could ever befuddle me?

Hubris is a bitch.

(It’s reportedly okay for trains; the bus—which is what she’s taking—seems to be Another Matter.)

The Lost Subways of North America

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Book cover: The Lost Subways of North AmericaThe Lost Subways of North America, in which Jake Berman looks at the successes and failures of 23 North American transit systems, is out now from the University of Chicago Press. The book’s text is accompanied by a hundred or so of Berman’s own maps, and is based on his series of maps of discontinued and proposed subway systems: see the online index for what made it into the book. On his blog, Berman is posting “deleted scenes”: city chapters that were cut from the book for length, like Denver and Portland.

See the Guardian’s interview with Berman (thanks, Michael); the Strong Towns interview focuses specifically on Los Angeles.

Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

Urban Caffeine on the NYC Subway Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

“I remember the first time I saw the New York City subway map. I called an Uber.” On her Urban Caffeine channel, Thea looks at the oft-maligned, controversial and complicated New York subway map. Her take is informed by her experience growing up in pre-GPS, pre-Google Maps Manila, which she frankly found easier to navigate; by contrast, she finds New York’s map too cluttered and information-dense and more in tune with the needs of New Yorkers than visitors and tourists.

New York and Philadelphia Regional Rail Networks on One Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

NYC and Philadelphia regional rail networks
Evelyn Ivy (GitHub)

Here’s a rail network map that shows the commuter rail lines of both New York City and Philadelphia. It’s by Evelyn Ivy, who explains on Mastodon that it took six months of work to complete. “Showing five different commuter rail systems (#CTRail, #MetroNorth, #LIRR, #NJTransit, and #SEPTA), this map depicts everywhere a passenger can get to by train from NYC or Philadelphia without using Amtrak.” (The keys are Trenton and New Haven, where you can hop from one system to the next.)

Upcoming Leventhal Exhibition Will Explore Boston Transit Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

An upcoming exhibition at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center, Getting Around Town: Four Centuries of Mapping Boston in Transit, “brings together an extraordinary collection of maps, plans, ephemera, and other materials to investigate how Bostonians have moved around the city in the past, present, and future.” Opens September 9 and runs until April 27, 2024. Free admission.

Geographical on the NYC Subway Map Debate

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Geographical magazine has a short history of the New York City subway map and its controversies. This has been a fraught and hotly contested topic for most of the last 50 years, and Jules Stewart’s article can’t go into nearly enough depth to capture it all, but it could serve as a decent entry point for those not in the know. Drawing rather heavily on the expertise of Peter Lloyd (previously), Stewart covers the subject from the first subway maps to where the MTA goes from here.

Previously: A Naïve Look at New York’s Subway Map.

European Night Train Network Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Back on Track map of European night trains, 2023

Night train advocacy group Back on Track has a map showing the current network of European night trains offered by various train operators. It’s colour coded by operator, but individual lines are a bit hard to follow, and using various dashed lines for both less-than-daily service and forthcoming service is a bit confusing. Then again, given the sharp uptick of night train services being offered, it’s almost unavoidable that any map of this sort will be a bit of a jumble: compare with Jug Cerović’s version (previously) to see what I mean.

Colour and the New York Subway Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Gothamist looks at how colour has been used on maps of New York’s subways: first to to distinguish between subway companies, then to distinguish lines from one another. The post talks to, and draws on the work of, Peter Lloyd, who’s been studying the history of subway mapping in New York and gave a talk last Saturday on the subject of colouring the map’s subway lines. See Peter’s blog post on the subject from this time last year.

Kenneth Field Redesigns the Tube Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

One of two redesigned London tube maps by Kenneth Field. This one has a colour palette that is more accomodating to people with colour vision deficiency.
Kenneth Field

Kenneth Field has been a vocal critic of the London tube map’s increasing complexity and clutter. Earlier this year he advocating dumping the map and starting from a clean slate. At last month’s NACIS conference he revealed two versions of a redesign that does just that. Based on an earlier 2019 redesign exercise, this version is inarguably a Beck-inspired diagram; it just benefits from not shoehorning more and more information into an existing, already busy map. In fact, it removes quite a bit of information, relegating it to the index on the reverse side. And in his second variant (above), he commits what I gather is a minor heresy by removing the iconic colours of the original Tube lines, allowing the map to use colour to indicate mode and also accommodate people with colour vision deficiency. Ken explains on his blog post; his NACIS talk is available on YouTube.

Previously: Part Two of Unfinished London’s Tube Map History; Kenneth Field: ‘Dump the Map’; So the Launch of the New Tube Map Seems to Be Going Well.

Update, 16 Jan 2023: Commentary from Transit Maps.

Part Two of Unfinished London’s Tube Map History

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

And here’s part two of Jay Foreman’s history of London Tube’s map, which looks at its post-Beck existence and increasing clutter and complication. (To say nothing of Beck’s post-map existence.) Part one is here.

Previously: Unfinished London: History of the Tube Map; Kenneth Field: ‘Dump the Map’; So the Launch of the New Tube Map Seems to Be Going Well; Tube Map Adds Thameslink Stations, Becomes More Even Complicated; Has the Tube Map Become Too Complicated?

Mark Ovenden’s YouTube Channel Begins with a Look at the Madrid Metro

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Mark Ovenden has launched a YouTube channel focusing on transit map design—which is what you’d expect from the author of Transit Maps of the World (along with other books on transit system design and transport maps: he is by no means a stranger to this blog). It launches today with its first episode, an on-the-ground look at the history of the Madrid metro system and its maps.