The most famous transit map in the world has been redesigned. London's underground rail network, the Tube, has a new east-west line, the Elizabeth Line, and with it, a new map. But new turns out not to be better.
The revolutionary original has been updated many times already but there'sso much information on it now, the genius of the original has been smothered. "The current base map," says one expert in transit map design, "is a piece of garbage."
It's a shame. Maps do more than show you the routes and stops. Designed well, they capture the imagination. You use the Tube because it's cool. You know it's cool because hey, look at the design of that map. It's so cool the whole world knows about it and of course it's on T-shirts and tea towels. The Tube map is a symbol of London pride.
Harry Beck, designer of the Tube map. Photo / supplied
This should be the aim for Auckland Transport. Once the CRL is done, put the new Auckland transit map on a tea towel. And billboards and all the rest. With a cool new design.
A map on its own won't make everyone catch the bus or train. The service has to be good and cheap enough for that to happen. But good design builds the perception of value.
The Tube map was designed in 1933 by Harry Beck, a draughtsman working for the Underground Signals Office. Beck's map was revolutionary because it didn't conform to geography. He knew the streets of London and the stations on them were a higgledy-piggledy mess, so he reimagined the city as a strictly geometric diagram. All the lines run horizontally, vertically or at 45 degrees. Then he added white blobs with a border to signify interchange stations.
Beck's insight was that Tube passengers care less about distance between stops than knowing which line their stop is on and how to get to it. That was the information he had to make clear. The result has inspired map design all over the world ever since.
But the new Tube map has the very quality of OMG-that's-far-too-much-spaghetti the original sought to abolish. Why? Because there's too much information for the format.
The new London Tube map. When good ideas outlive their use-by ... Image / supplied
The lesson: cities evolve. New problems can't always be solved with old methods. What used to work for cars doesn't work now - and it's the same with maps.
The new map also has sponsorship: Ikea paid a reported NZ$1.5 million for a year of having its banner and the location of its shops on the map.
Auckland has some Tube-inspired maps, most notably the marvellous Congestion Free Network (CFN) designs produced by Greater Auckland in 2013 and updated in 2017. Those maps propose connected mass-transit services to all corners of the city and they inform some government thinking: see, for example, the superbly clean and optimistic Auckland Transport Alignment Project map.
2018 map for the Auckland Transport Alignment Project. Nice idea, pity there's such slow progress. Image / supplied
Sadly, these maps don't seem to inform the thinking of many transport officials. Asked to plan urgently needed mass-transit services for Aotearoa's super-congested main city, the transport agencies have spent nearly five years moving more slowly than was hitherto thought humanly possible. They've been stuck in traffic.
