Designing Transit Maps for the Rider
Sunday, May 6, 2007 at 4:05pm 4 comments (last by Sal)
Last week (via 37 Signals) I found I came across this story of designer Eddie Jabbour who created his own simplified version of the NYC Subway map.
Hundreds of millions of dollars get poured into transit projects, building complex systems like the New York subway. A lot of money is spent studying transportation needs, engineering the best way to get between Point A and Point B. Yet next to nothing is spent once the transit infrastructure is built on explaining to the people it's built for how to actually use it.
It's like buying a Lego set and not getting the instructions.
If the signs don't make sense and people can't read the map, that shiny and expensive subway is going to be useless. Jabber designed a map which doesn't just have colored lines to show the subway routes, he designed a map which represents how the subway works in a way humans can understand.
He designed something his mother could use and even had a chance to present it to the MTA:
[When] he showed up at the agency’s Midtown offices with copies of his work, they were quick to find fault with it. According to Christopher Boylan, the transportation authority’s executive director of corporate and community affairs, who recalled the meeting, the main criticism was that Mr. Jabbour’s map [...] was artistic but geographically inaccurate.
While our own subway map was recently redesigned, it's not any better than before and I wonder what a designer could do with the Muni map.
4 Comments
Matt Friday, May 18, 2007 at 3:16pm
I thought the new Muni Metro map, although very easy to read, looks a bit off the scale.
Steve Boland Monday, June 4, 2007 at 1:11pm
Sorry for getting to this so late, but I wanted to chime in.
The Kick map is brilliant. Which is to say it's just chock full of ingenious solutions (badges doubling as stations, discarding the redundant "St"). It's also clear Jabbour actually thought through the *why* and *what* of the map first, which may sound obvious, but ...
The more I look at it the less happy I am with the new Muni Metro map. What actual purpose does it serve? Could a user unfamiliar with Muni actually use it to navigate anywhere? This is one case where the simplicity seems to be solely for simplicity's sake--it's counterproductive to take out so much information that you're left with very little of actual use. Muni would've been better off just posting line maps for the six routes *labeling all stops*. The text would've been tiny but I'm pretty sure a good designer could do something legible even in the microscopic space allotted.
Sal Thursday, August 2, 2007 at 8:36am
Found a sample/simple spider map (http://www.sfcityscape.com/maps/spider.html) over at SFCityscape a while back and loved the way it was laid out.
Perhaps there should be a competition? If someone could wrap their head around how things currently are and lay it out so that it's understandable, it might be easier for those whose job it is to see how things could be made simpler/better/more efficient.
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Mattymatt Monday, May 7, 2007 at 11:06am
The redesigned map certain is more look-at-able; my reaction to the one on the left is to instantly wince and look away, thinking, "there is no way to get usable information from this thing, so I won't waste time trying."