Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Interactive Transit Maps


TransitMe uses the Google Maps API to provide interactive maps of a number of transit systems around the world. Using TransitMe you can now zoom in and pan around the transit maps for a number of worldwide cities.

Currently the transit maps of New York, London, Paris, Madrid, Seoul and Shanghai are available on TransitMe.


If you are wondering why TransitMe doesn't overlay these transit maps on top of the underlying Google Maps road map layer then you should have a look at the the Actual New York MTA. Ben Schmidt has taken the transit maps of New York, Boston and Washington DC and then stretched, squeezed and rotated them so that they fit onto a Web Mercator map of New York.

The MTA Map of Actual New York helps to highlight the geographical inaccuracies common to transit maps. For example in New York the MTA map expands Manhattan, due to the higher proportion of lines and stations situated there. You have to admit that the map does lose some legibility when you squeeze all that information onto a more geographically accurate map.

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