Subway maps before and after Harry Beck
May. 14th, 2006 12:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinIn 1933, Harry Beck (apparently inspired by electrical circuit schematics) redrew the London Underground map as a network of vertical, horizontal and 45-degree diagonal lines, showing the topology of the system with little regard for physical geography. The map was a huge success and is often claimed to be the spiritual ancestor of most modern subway maps.
But how true is that, really? There were London Underground system maps before Beck, and some of them, interestingly, even incorporated a degree of geometric abstraction (such as this map from 1911, which doesn't go all the way to pure topology but does straighten out or otherwise distort some of the lines).
And while some designs are obviously Beck-inspired, and others are even more idealized, many modern subway maps are less idealized than the post-Beck London map. There seems to be a gradual movement back toward geography in recent years. After that horrible Seventies NYC map I mentioned earlier, which seems to have been an attempt to apply the one-train-route-one-line principle of the Washington, DC map to the much vaster New York system, the New York transit went to a more geographic map that reminds me of Fred Stingemore's idealized but moderately geographic pre-Beck London design from the early Thirties.
In Boston, from the Sixties through the Nineties they used a very Beckian abstracted "spider map" that mutated with the times but ended up looking sort of like this one; you can still see them in many stations and trains. (But they also issued folding maps that were sometimes very different from the spider map.) These days they've gone to a less abstract version that is still very rectilinear but makes more concessions to geography. It breaks the square-with-legs simplicity of the old map, but I like that you can see how different the D line is from the other Green Line branches with their profusion of street-intersection stops, and that it shows how close together three of the branches get around Cleveland Circle. On the other hand, it still doesn't convey just how close the southern Orange Line now runs to the Green Line E branch (a useful fact for Orange Line riders and people who need wheelchair access).
But how true is that, really? There were London Underground system maps before Beck, and some of them, interestingly, even incorporated a degree of geometric abstraction (such as this map from 1911, which doesn't go all the way to pure topology but does straighten out or otherwise distort some of the lines).
And while some designs are obviously Beck-inspired, and others are even more idealized, many modern subway maps are less idealized than the post-Beck London map. There seems to be a gradual movement back toward geography in recent years. After that horrible Seventies NYC map I mentioned earlier, which seems to have been an attempt to apply the one-train-route-one-line principle of the Washington, DC map to the much vaster New York system, the New York transit went to a more geographic map that reminds me of Fred Stingemore's idealized but moderately geographic pre-Beck London design from the early Thirties.
In Boston, from the Sixties through the Nineties they used a very Beckian abstracted "spider map" that mutated with the times but ended up looking sort of like this one; you can still see them in many stations and trains. (But they also issued folding maps that were sometimes very different from the spider map.) These days they've gone to a less abstract version that is still very rectilinear but makes more concessions to geography. It breaks the square-with-legs simplicity of the old map, but I like that you can see how different the D line is from the other Green Line branches with their profusion of street-intersection stops, and that it shows how close together three of the branches get around Cleveland Circle. On the other hand, it still doesn't convey just how close the southern Orange Line now runs to the Green Line E branch (a useful fact for Orange Line riders and people who need wheelchair access).
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Re: Melbourne transport map
Date: 2006-05-14 05:48 pm (UTC)