Monday’s Friday Reads – 27 May 2024

Why journeys from the UK are about to become much trickier (The Guardian)

c2c’s oldest trains to get major refurbishment (Ian Visits)

What’s really going on with high-speed rail in the US? (Urban Condition)

Install speed tables as fast as you can (Urbanism Speakeasy)

TransPennine Express kicks off first intercity battery trial (The Engineer)

Leasing group will add Regent’s Viceroy electric sea gliders to its portfolio (Aviation International)

Right now’s the best time of year for a ride on Tokyo’s often-forgotten streetcar line (SoraNews24)

Mind the map: a new design for the London Underground map (esri)

6 comments

  1. The “New Underground Map” is both brilliant & a disaster
    Brilliant, because the actual layout / plan is so much better than what has happened to the current one.
    Disaster, because the line-colouring is hopeless – the exact same mistake as was made during the 1950’s (?) – having the Circle/Met/District lines all the same colur REALLY CONFUSES visitors.
    There’s a reason all (?) urban transport system maps differentiate between “lines” by colour, after all.
    But – let’s have that new layout, please?

  2. Battery/electric trains: A brilliant idea, now the technology is, hopefully, here ….
    That I can guarantee will be misused by the politicians, ( All & any politician ) as a way of “saving money” rather that using it to extend routes past the wires.
    They will just use this as an excuse to … not put up the wires in the first place.

  3. That redesigned tube map does offer any obvious what to know which line to take.
    Other than that, I like the arrangement of tramlink in central croydon

  4. The ESRI map not only has errors, look at Bethnal Green/Shoreditch, but I’m not sure how you’d navigate with it. You do want to know which line (not type of) you need. Also, while the variable line width is an interesting idea, it doesn’t reflect the massive difference in frequency between Tube and Overground lines. Most (with historical reference) would describe Overground routes as high-frequency, but the map underplays them.

  5. There may be something in giving the lines numbers in the style of European cities, but the T1/1 format seems unwieldy – what is wrong with T11? Also, something that needs to be dealt with is differences in stopping patterns which doesn’t work well with such numbers as each stopping pattern would need a number, which would make the centre of the map probably even more cramped than it is.

  6. That ERSI map is quite possible the most user hostile representation of the tube I have ever seen.

    A bunch of identically coloured lines going into the centre, and various stations within it. Let’s play, “guess where this train emerges on the other side!”

    This looks like someone just assumed that everyone is already familiar with which lines go where, and so it’s totally fine to remove that information from the map.

    It’s dreadful.

Comments are closed.