thoughtcrumbs

Tube map with walklines

When my mom and I were in London a few months ago, we made a pretty moronic loop on the Circle Line one morning, which I will choose to blame on station construction and a missing sign. When we couldn't find the track for the train toward Portobello Road (two stops to the "left" in tube-map terms), our sleep-deprived conclusion was that the train only went in one direction. So we gritted our teeth and took the loop all the way in the other direction (or, nearly all the way; construction had closed the last two stations before our destination, so we were forced to backtrack on the train in the opposite direction which had magically appeared). In most cities, we would have just walked between our destinations, but we were unable to gauge physical distance between stations on the tube map, and it was raining. An otherwise exemplary bit of information design, the map had alienated us from our geographic surroundings to the point that we were overly dependent on what it did convey: underground train lines. Enter the tube map with walklines, a simple solution with black lines connecting stations less than 500m apart. While several IAs agree the walklines detract from the skimmability of the map, the original map design was so good that adding another layer of information doesn't seem to harm it. Also beautiful is the walkline constellation map, allowing a a somewhat anthropomorphic look at urban planning. (From Boing Boing.)