An earlier version of this article was published in 2017.
The noble art of public transport mapping is one of the most complex and exciting of all that exists. When representing on a map the different paths of a network of meter the priority is not so much to show the exact route of the lines as the points where it makes stops. Thus, transport maps prioritize sharpness and clarity over the reliable tracing of terrain conditions, making their design an intellectual challenge.
When looking at the map of the London or Madrid underground, for example, the enormous distortion of the real proportions of the city is paradoxical. Very distant neighborhoods suddenly appear near the central almond, and vice versa. So on many occasions we circulate to blind: we know that the line goes to point X, but we are completely unaware in what way Solve the distance between one station and another. On the map, it is almost always straight.
So anyone who has spent more than two minutes studying one of these maps will have wondered: what do the lines look like? actually? In Data is Beautiful, one of the funniest Reddit forums out there, various users began answering the question months ago. Thus, they emerged through the network gifs that compared the real layout of the urban transport systems and the layout shown by the maps.
The snowball got bigger and bigger and the result has been a wonderful collection of gifs and graphic works that compare the physical reality of cities and the ingenuity of designers when it comes to translating the intricate lines into a functional plane. , useful for the user and understandable. There are cities as small as Antwerp and as big as Barcelona, and they are all very interesting. So here we leave the collection: