Transit Maps: Apple vs. Google vs. Us

Transit Maps. Apple Maps. Google Maps.

Transit maps are beautiful. You see them plastered on bus shelters and subway stops. Your parents kept one in their pockets. You might have one burned into your brain.

A transit map is much more than a list of stations. It’s the underlying anatomy of your city. It shows how people move, how neighbourhoods are connected, and how your craziest city adventures begin.

Brooklyn, New York City (where they paint murals of Biggie)

Of course, transit maps are also incredibly functional: they’re abstract diagrams that show you how your transit system works. They have rigid lines and fixed-angles. While they’re not geographically accurate, they do a pretty good job of helping you figure out how to get from A-to-B. Every transit line has a different colour, and intersecting lines show you where to transfer.

You can ask any transit agency designer: creating a transit map is a painstaking process. Transit agencies put lots of thought into making diagrams that are equally beautiful and functional.

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Clockwise, from top left: Barcelona, Berlin, London, Paris, New York City, Montreal. (Notice how different each city’s design is.)

…although no two cities approach transit maps exactly the same way.
Which is great!
Unless you’re trying to design a transit map for every city in the world.
Imagine that: every transit line in every city, condensed into one, single, beautiful, curvy, map. Millions of stops, thousands of lines, hundreds of agencies.

Google Maps and Apple Maps have tried to do it, but we thought we could do better.
They have lots of resources. We don’t. But then again… we have Anton.

Map God

In this post, we’ll show you how Anton, our algorithm alchemist, took on both Apple and Google. He’ll be posting a technical follow up soon, so if you’re into that, we’ll let you know on Twitter. (If you want to take our word for it though, maybe just download our app? See our transit maps in all their titillating, unadulterated glory.)

Why we did it
Transit maps are hard. Really hard. Even for Apple and Google. Piecing a transit map together, city by city, agency by agency, stop by stop, without it turning into a hairy mess is INCREDIBLY difficult. So far, no one (not even Apple or Google) have been able to create a transit map that is both automatically generated and well designed. Why is that?

Let’s start with Apple. They try to make sure that their transit maps look “hand drawn”. Aesthetically, they’re quite nice. But Apple is notorious for taking a long time to add new transit to their maps. They only launched in a few cities, and release new markets very slowly. It seems like they’ve opted for a slow, manual process for their maps.

Oooh, pretty!

How about Google? They definitely don’t hand-draw their transit maps. Like us, they generate them automatically using algorithms. However, they look… well… kinda dreadful. (Sorry Sergey). Google often gets lazy, simply connecting transit stations with straight lines.
Notice how the train tracks are disjointed at various parts on Google’s transit map:

Go home Google, you’re drunk.

We wanted the prettiness of Apple’s slow solution, but the scalability of Google’s automatic process. In short, we wanted algorithms to draw beautiful transit maps.
Here’s what makes our transit maps special:
Unparalleled Curves
Google is great at doing things at scale. But they don’t always do it smoothly. Seriously, look at these transit lines. What is going on?

More https://medium.com/swlh/transit-maps-apple-vs-google-vs-us-cb3d7cd2c362#.3rnzmewh5