It’s easy to lose track of where you’re traveling on a subway: the train leaves the station underground, the windows grow dark and soon you arrive at your destination… but how far did you travel? Even the maps of the worlds subways, with their easy to read simplified formats, mostly lack any sense of scale for the underground system. These simple maps by Neil Freeman at Fake Is The New Real, add that missing element, cluing us into how big an area these people moving networks cover. Try comparing the maps of San Francisco and Paris… the scale of the results is revealing and surprising.
Above: London – Transport for London
Below: Tokyo – TRTA
Shanghai – Shanghai Metro Group
Seoul – Seoul Metro
Paris – RATP
Moscow – Moskovskoe Metro
Washington DC – WMATA
Chicago – CTA
Berlin – BVG/S-Bahn Berlin
Beijing – Beijing Subway
Nice and actually and excellent demonstration of how spectacularly useless BART (‘the best public transportation system in the US’) is. It goes across a long distance, but rather slowly and it doesn’t go many places in that area. (It also doesn’t connect with the fragmented bus systems in the area to make up for it.)
I’d love to see Taipei’s system on here too.