Crypto News: MapLab: The London Tube needs a new map

A Note to Readers: For the next few months, we'll be publishing MapLab on a monthly rather than a biweekly basis, while newsletter founder Laura Bliss focuses on some other projects. Send your feedback to Marie Patino at mpatino14@bloomberg.net.

On Tuesday, May 24, London launched the long-awaited Crossrail, or Elizabeth Line, which crosses the capital from Shenfield, in the East, to Reading, in the West. The £18.9 billion railway line will slash travel times for many Londoners and should help alleviate crowding on the underground network.

But one thing that hasn't been met with enthusiasm is the new release of the Tube map, revamped for the occasion with the new line and its additional stops, adding more information to a cacophony of colors, grey zebra-like fare zone representation, and awkward interchange stations. It also added Ikea logos, as the Swedish retailer sponsored Transport for London (TfL) to have the location of its stores on the official Tube map for a year. According to TfL documents, it paid £800,000 for it. (Free and potentially not fully accurate Pret-A-Manger and Greggs maps made by disenchanted Twitter users are much more entertaining.)

A new line could have meant it was time to rethink the map. But alas, a complete design overhaul was not part of the plan.

"Let's just be blunt here," said Maxwell J. Roberts, lecturer in psychology at the University of Essex and transit map designer. "The current basemap is a piece of design garbage."

"I'm wondering if [TfL] is trolling us and is trying to see how bad it can make the map before people get really upset about it."

Current Tube Map. The Elizabeth Line is in purple and white, if you can manage to distinguish it on this tiny image. Credit: TfL

The late Henry "Harry" Beck, a draftsman at the Underground Signals Office turned designer, came up with the current diagram design of the Tube map that was originally published in 1933. Beck chose to distort the geography of the city to make a readable and less crowded map of the system as more stations were popping up in central London. Prior to his design, the maps of the network respected geography, more like the map of the New York subway. But London roads and streets are not close to being organized in a grid fashion, and the result looked messier. Beck's design, in addition to distorting geography, represents stations as white dots with a black border. When lines intersect at a station, the style makes it quite easy to comprehend. Beck inspired many transit map designers after him, but many critics worry that the very good original design has outlived its usefulness.

"The Tube map is iconic, but it's no secret that it has become very overcrowded with information over the years with new lines and modes being added," wrote Jen (who asked to not use her last name for privacy reasons), a transportation YouTuber and enthusiast, in a Twitter message. "As a non-Londoner with a transport interest I do use a digital version of it to navigate, but that's combined with a bit of existing knowledge on how everything works and knowing roughly where things are located already."

Henry Beck diagram design, 1933 Credit: Image from the David Rumsey Map Collection courtesy Stanford University Libraries

TfL hasn't changed the size of the station dots since Beck designed the layout, but there are many, many more stations that have to be depicted, according to Roberts. "They're just piling up all these extra lines and not doing it very well, and not doing it very consistently," he said. "Now they've added easy walking distance interchanges on the map. And when you do that it demands a little bit more respect to geography than they're showing at the moment."

The result is confusion, especially at certain interchange stations, like Liverpool Street or Paddington.

Crazy station interchanges Credit: TfL

"It really needs to be started again," Roberts said. "I've seen a lot of nice redesigns of it but [TfL] is just not taking it seriously anymore."

Roberts himself redesigned the map many times over the years, laying out the city in different manners, starting from the trickiest stations to represent. Here's his octolinear design, in which he's curated information from the TfL map.

Credit: Max Roberts Credit: Max Roberts

More than being overcrowded, the current Tube map doesn't represent the complete railway service offerings in the city, because it doesn't include all the railways that aren't part of the Tube system. This is a particular omission in South London, where the network is complex and scattered, according to Roberts. "The goal is now an all London railways map," he said.

"As great as the Tube map is, I do feel the time has come for a rethink, perhaps even different designs aimed at different audiences giving them just the information that's relevant for them," Jen wrote. "Network maps are a dark art, balancing legibility with the right level of information — I don't envy the person who has to solve this problem!"

Here's how Crossrail will transform London travel (Bloomberg)
Elizabeth Line: the biggest redrawing of the Tube map in 20 years (Evening Standard)
Roundle: A London underground World game (London.subwaydle)
Right-wing organization launches chilling map marking schools as 'woke hot spots' (HuffPost)
What redistricting looks like in every state (FiveThirtyEight)
Midterm elections 2022: the issues that matter to Americans (Axios)