Harry Beck’s 1933 London Tube Map | Hacker News Reader

Harry Beck’s 1933 London Tube Map

openculture.com

The system diagram drops important information such as how far a rider is traveling and how long it will take. This contributes to the interminable feeling of riding forever under the streets of [city name]. It also makes it harder to integrate with intermodal options, or walking, because riders are never quite sure where they are. The system diagram is ubiquitous, and there's a point to it, but it ought to be just one tool in the box.

Transport for London has a variant of the map annotated with walking times between the stations too - of course at the cost of being more crowded…

https://content.tfl.gov.uk/walking-tube-map.pdf

This is definitely hard to parse. Canada Water to Canary Wharf is 144 minute walk on that map LOL. It's a couple of minutes by Underground. It is about 2 miles walk, but it's definitely not 2 hours and 24 minutes!

It's about 1h if you take the Rotherhite tunnel, but if you use lungs for breathing I wouldn't recommend that.

Otherwise you need to take the Greenwich foot tunnel, which adds a lot to the trip. It may not take 2h24min but it's about 4.4 miles, not 2.

The major shortcoming of that is it doesn't show walking times for some fairly easy connections between different lines and instead implies a much longer indirect route (e.g Angel to Farringdon is a 15-20 minute direct walk which is quite reasonable compared to an >11 minute journey involving train and platform changes or the suggested 42 minutes walking a very indirect route via a station interchange)

In my city there was, for a brief time, a neat combination of the two. It was visually stylized with simplified geometry for easy reading, but it sorta-kinda indicated real distances and directions. I really miss that one -- seemed like the best of both worlds to me.

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Found it: https://people.kth.se/~e95_lra/tunnelbana/bild/linjekarta.gi...

Which is to compare against the highly stylised one: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nSNE5wTaCGA/VDZiVonjldI/AAAAAAAAQ5...

And, well, something more realistic: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BPoNTy6r7UI/VDZiXCe5oEI/AAAAAAAAQ...

For the London underground, I've always used a metric of "five minutes per two stops" and this has served me very well over the years

If you're relying on the underground those data aren't important. How long maybe, but the journey time between stops on the tube is minimal and after riding it once you'll just assume its 30 seconds - 2 minutes.

There is a huge disconnect between underground users and walkers, I walk everywhere in London, as do most locals, mercifully the tourists and out-of-towners take the tube, unless you're going > 6/7 stops it'll take about the same amount of time.

There's an absolute tonne of articles and books praising this form of subway map, but I've seen little to no actual analysis of their benefit other than being widely adopted (which only proves a trend has caught on, not that it's in any way a benign one).

Arguments for their use that I've seen seem to just parrot the original marketing justifications without any novel perspective, nor much revision of those justifications with newer systems in different cities.

Anecdotally, they seem a very poor design: they actively discourage multimodal transport and as a result entrench further reliance on expensive subways for everything (don't get me wrong subways are great, but they're incredibly disruptive to build and cities with comprehensive subway networks tend to have extremely poor corresponding overground transit options - in contrast see NLs relatively sparse subways)

"cities with comprehensive subway networks tend to have extremely poor corresponding overground transit options"

You think this is a disadvantage of subways? That seems upside down.

The only transport methods that match the reliability of subways are - surface rail with loads of expensive bridges, and trams with preferential signaling at junctions. Both of these are similarly disruptive to build in an existing city. Buses, even with bus lanes added to roads, can't come close.

Anything on rails above ground is unreliable in geographies that have ice or leaves, though.

It's interesting how a map design can have an influence on social behaviour and city development.

> Beck’s design may have helped persuade city dwellers to make the leap to suburbs serviced by the Underground “by making them look closer to the center, and showing how easy it was to commute.”

Somewhat related, it reminded me some new residential buildings were intentionally incorrectly named with a hint of the nearby district. e.g. A building is located in district A, but was named as "B garden". It is because district B is an over-all better living area, so the flats can be priced higher.

Unfortunately, these maps remove all intuitions about where the heck you are, especially if you're a tourist.

The more scope is included in the map, the less comprehensible it becomes, as the layout bears no relation to how the places relate, like how relatively far away they are and in what direction.

Topological maps conceal truths like you might be able to walk faster between these two particular stations than if you take the train.

If all you have is a real map that doesn't have transit details, and a schematic transit map, it can be hard to have a complete picture.

Some middle representation is helpful: a caricature of the metropolitan area with the transit grid and stations shown at least loosely in the right places.

This article shows two maps of the NY subway system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_map

The one on the left is like what I'm talking about. The one on the right is more detailed. Both are better than a purely topological diagram with no relation to the places.

In contrast to something like this:

https://www.tokyometro.jp/en/subwaymap/

In both the NY maps, if you find the station where you're dcurrently located, you actually know from either map where in NY you are, and about how far it is to other places.

The MBTA (Boston) map has long been mostly schematic. There were a couple points when I was an undergrad that I took the T (subway) and changed lines at least once only to discover I was about 2 blocks from where I started.

All good points. Sadly, there is no perfect solution. Which ever way you draw the map you are making a compromise.

The London map is by far the easiest I have ever encountered for figuring out how to get from station A to station B. On the other hand, as you say, there are sections where the distance is radically deceptive.

With the maps that show the stations in their real locations, they are much harder to read, but you get a sense of distance.

My personal preference is for the London style, because by the time I get on the train I generally don't care how long it takes, I just want to settle back and get where I'm going. Hopefully most tourists to London will get the message beforehand, through guides or advice, that nearly every tourist destination is easily walkable for able-bodied persons.

Pedestrian walking signage on the streets of London is pretty good as well.

One of the challenges with "real locations" is differences in scale. In the case of Boston for example, a bunch of lines come together in a rather dense area of downtown. But then a number of lines (even excluding commuter rail) head off to terra incognito--OK, I exaggerate but into the suburbs or even small cities outside Boston.

Scale is one of the main reasons Harry Beck's map worked. Central London on an accurate map isn't that confusingly laid out at a large enough scale. But the outlying suburbs are just so far away, and the schematic is a lot less confusing for the intended purpose of getting the correct train connection than flipping back and forth between different maps and insets at different scale levels

You can compromise this by having the urban core (often the main tourist area) done in a more “realistic” way and then the rest of the outlying lines done schematically.

New Yorkers say this stuff all the time to defend their unique geographical subway map, ignoring that the map is still so far zoomed out and inaccurate that it doesn’t help a tourist at all with any understanding that is relevant to walking distances. At the same time, the nyc subway map is incredibly confusing and idiosyncratic, tourists will keep getting confused and lost thanks to it while trying to navigate the actual subway system the map is primarily supposed to explain. How about making the map simpler, removing essentially useless geographical information but making sure ppl don’t get lost on the way to their destination stop.

To be fair, the NYC subway can be extra confusing for tourists from cities with more "predictable" metro systems. For example, in the Madrid and Barcelona Metros, all trains departing from each given platform are guaranteed to belong to the same line and will serve the same stations from A to B—no need to think at all. That's also usually the case in the London Underground, though some lines may split and there are some exchange stations where you need to pay attention as to what line the train arriving at the platform belongs to. Now compare that to the NYC Subway, with its routes, lines, express services, local services, etc. Anyone used to the simplicity of Madrid or Barcelona style systems is bound to find it confusing.

Not that I have anything against the idea though, it's just a different philosophy and it is connected somewhat to the NYC Subway's rare 24/7 service. I have fun memories of when I went to New York with my parents when I was 18, and they were simply unable to understand the Subway in depth and relied on me to make sense of it.

A hundred years ago most subway maps were more geographic - until Londons tube map came along. Most cities over time switched to a more easy to understand diagrammatic map. In New York, the resistance to that change was huge - it was tried in the 70s with the vignelli map, and failed.

If u remove all the unnecessary geography, u can have more affordances to show night time service and or local and express patterns … look at the weekender, which is much more understandable to ppl from other places.

The latest tube maps include the time it takes to walk along a line between stations in the central zones. It's not a to-scale map, but it gives some useful hints.

https://tfl.gov.uk/maps/track/tube

The problem with making the London map topographic and to scale is that the northwest extension of the Metropolitan line stretches far out into the countryside. A to-scale map would have to shrink the central area - the most useful part of the map - which would make it cluttered and hard to read.

The zone system on the map provides useful hints about absolute distance without being perfectly to-scale.

That aside, most people using a metro system need to know how long it will take to get somewhere on the system more than they need to know exactly where they are.

TFL's app includes journey time estimates.

Although (to my knowledge) a new version hasn't been produced since 2014, the London Connections map [0] does something along these lines.

It's primarily geographical, but isn't completely precise, and it retains some topological features.

I think most passengers would find it too confusing, but maybe there are ways it could be simplified.

See also the unofficial Carto Metro map [1], which is an actual geographic map of London's rail network. And also the map of key bus routes in Central London [2], which is largely topological but represents major parks and attractions.

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20181222165456/http://content.tfl...

[1] https://cartometro.com/metro-london/

[2] https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/bus-route-maps/k...

For anyone who finds this interesting, I recommend reading Underground Maps Unravelled, by Robert J Maxwell: http://www.tubemapcentral.com/writing/umu.html

It covers the history of London Underground maps and signage, analysis on how/why certain map elements help users, and contains a number of painstakingly recreated historical and theoretical transit maps to illustrate the points.

I don't think Edward Tufte would approve of removing densely representable information: distance between stops and relative position under the city.

I would take the original map and then vary the line thickness and/or shading to represent something additional, like typical ridership, wait times, or cost. So much is possible that would be better than discarding everything except connectedness.

I don't think Edward Tufte would approve

You might not think that, but you'd be wrong:

https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

That's neat, thanks for the link. Looks like he's ambivalent about it: "The geometric purity and beauty of Beck's map is wonderful and is a big symbol of the Underground; the geographically accurate map is also just fine."

(2018)

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