What? by Mark Ovenden:

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Anyone who’s ever dreamed of pulling together a book has to face the daunting subject of what to include….and more specifically; what to leave out!

As I gradually assembled the permissions to reproduce the transit maps of the world it dawned on me that there was a lot more historical material for some cities than for others. My friend Mike who had been a tower of support since the beginning of the project suddenly gained a new role: he would be my editor.

Mike helped me to focus on the subject matter; what was it about the maps that made them interesting to designers. How were they similar – and why were they different. I began several months of thorough investigation about the nature of the maps and diagrams of subways. One aspect that I began to understand a lot better was why many transit maps have adopted the schematic solution as opposed to using maps that are true to the geography of their cities above.

This has had the added benefit of not just being the most effective way of depicting the complex system of tunnels beneath our feet but also has inspired designers because when well done they are often very beautiful in their own right. The London diagram is one of the greatest examples of this as it evokes a sense of balance and clarity. This is one of the reasons why Harry Beck’s original design for the London Tube has both stood the test of time and been emulated round the world by other transit operators. It has also inspired artists to play with the design concepts and come up with pieces like "The Great Bear" - now on display at London’s Tate Gallery


(CAPTION Color-codes lines first appeared in the early 1900’s – here they can be seen on a Paris Métro map produced by the Bon Marche in 1914.)

Another aspect of the cartographer’s tool box is the symbol. An internationally recognizable graphic language has evolved on transit maps not just out of necessity but also out of the strength of the best designed maps. In addition to the similarities like color-coded lines (the single most common theme linking almost every urban rail map on the planet - which can be traced back as early as 1908 in London and New York, 1914 in Paris etc) a kind of symbolic lexicon has developed which can help any visitor comprehend any foreign system (if you can't read Russian or Japanese you should still be able to plan a journey on the Moscow or Tokyo Metro map). This is evident from the similarities in map design all over the world and has only really been collectively observed since the publication of this book. For example the symbol for an interchange is very often an outline circular or spherical shape (commonly in black) with an open (often white) centre. This can be seen on over half of all the worlds’ transit maps. Equally obvious is the symbol for an airport or connections to other modes of transit.
In the book I tried to write not just for the transit fan but also for the casual tourist or student of graphic design. I ended up supplying many observations on the navigation of the worlds Metro systems. For instance another common graphic symbol is the end of line because the train you get on will almost always have begun its journey elsewhere and therefore it will have 'terminated' at the station you begin at just before you got there! Having said that I bet there is a word for it in some languages - especially something like German, as they are usually so wonderfully precise in their wording.

Not having had the good fortune to visit more than half of the systems included in the book, I eventually I ended up with much more text, many more images and large numbers of historical maps for the bigger, older systems. Again it was long-suffering Mike who suggested that a good way to segregate my material would be to borrow from the iconography of transit maps, so I came up with the idea of different chapters being different “Zones” like the fare zones on many maps.


(CAPTION: There’s a huge difference in sizes of subway system: here the worlds biggest, New York (from a 1948 map), alongside one of the newest and smallest: Santiago de Chile)

Now at last I had a structure. I allocated more pages to the cities that had produced the most interesting and diverse range of historical maps. The newer cities with subway or those who had not yet opened inevitably would have less space tan the grand daddies like New York, London or Paris. There followed a frantic re-ordering of the cities to decide which one would fit into each of initially five zones. This was a difficult task as it would inevitably imply that certain cities subways were more “important” than others, but this was definitely not the case – it was simply to do with how much space was needed to reflect the material available.

Finally I came up with a grouping (this is the list from the American edition, though it has changed somewhat from the first UK edition)
Zone 1: 8 cities, 4 pages per city..
Zone 2: 15 cities, 2 pages per city.
Zone 3: 28 cities, 1 page per city.
Zone 4: 16 cities, 2 cities per page,
Zone 5: 18 cities, 1-3 cities per page,
Zone 6: 155 cities, about 28 cities per page,.
Appendix: Fantasy maps and Index, Bibliography etc

What became apparent here are certain regional similarities? For example a number of South American subway maps have copied the Mexico City idea of displaying a unique pictogram for each individual station (alongside the full name in text) to help those who are illiterate (the story goes that London's early tube stations and those on the New York subway had a unique arrangement of ceramic tile decor for the same reason). In South East Asia there's a common practice to number the stations - the standard format being line number followed by station number hence a journey night consist of leaving from 312 changing at 319 and getting off at 502. Most German cities have a standard symbol for the U-Bahn: a giant white capital U on a blue cube: their maps are all pretty similar, save for the wonderful Stuttgart system which is depicted without a dingle horizontal or vertical line.

View more information on Mark Ovenden's Transit Maps of the World

Mark Ovenden

Transit Maps of the World

transit

maps

history

graphic design

subways

transport

traffic

architecture

Penguin Books

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