Eisenhower and H.C. Beck's Love Child
Eisenhower Interstate System in the style of H.C. Beck's London Underground Diagram, originally uploaded by Senex Prime.
UPDATE: Prints of this diagram are now available for sale here.
Here's the result of my latest "designing stuff because I feel like it" phase: a map of America's comprehensive Interstate highway system in the form of a metro or subway map.
I came across a very different take of this on the internet last week, an incredibly simplified, very rectangular (and very orange!) diagram by Chris Yates. Many viewers of this map were calling it a "Beck style map" (after H.C. Beck, the originator of the London Underground Diagram) or a "subway style map", but on the whole, I disagreed with that point of view.
The best examples of subway maps use strong colour codes for separate lines and a clear hierarchy of detail (interchanges, major stations, minor stations, etc.) to convey a lot of information rapidly and clearly. And while there is some degree of geographical distortion in most metro maps (the centre of London in Beck's diagram is greatly enlarged compared to the outer suburbs), there should always be an underlying sense of the relationship between destinations in reality and on the map.
So that's what I set out to create - a simplified diagram of the Interstate system in the style of the best transport diagrams. Armed with Google Earth, Google Maps, Wikipedia, a gridded pad of paper and pen, Adobe Illustrator CS3, Chris Yates' map and another excellent map by Rebecca Brown that I found on Flickr, I began my Herculean task.
Early on, I decided that the "major" highways (those divisible by 5) would form the framework of my diagram. These would be thicker of line than the minor roads, and would be distinctively colour coded. Their termini would also be called out in a bolder fashion than the other roads. This was done relatively painlessly, with very little rejigging required to make all the major intersections line up. I was surprised at how much this simple grid already looked like America's borders, which gave me great hope that things were going to work out well.
Then it was onto fitting the minor highways into this grid. Even though these roads don't have specific colour codes, I strove to give some extra information in the shades of grey used: a darker gray was used for even-numbered roads (running from west to east; lower numbers to the south, higher numbers to the north) and a lighter grey for the odd-numbered roads (running from north to south; lower numbers to the west, higher numbers to the east). Each road has its number marked at each terminus, with a full key at the bottom of the map for cross-reference. A bit of tweaking was required here and there to make every road and name fit neatly (it gets a bit crowded in the eastern states!), but in general everything worked out beautifully. I even managed to show concurrency of Interstates by running the "lines" next to each other, just as they do on subway maps.
Then I added the Great Lakes, coastline, borders and the key. Done!
All up, this project took around a week to complete. There's still some little tweaks and fixes to make, and I feel sure that road aficionados across the country will be only too ready to point out my errors as time goes by, but overall, I'm extremely happy with the way it turned out!
Some oddities: I-99 breaks the grid by being placed to the WEST of I-95. Apparently, the number was written into Section 332 of the National Highway Designation Act of 1995 by Bud Shuster, then-chair of the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, the bill's sponsor, and the representative of the district through which the highway runs. Why? Maybe he thought 99 was a cool number for his local highway?
I-97 is to the east of I-95 (as it should be), but it is the only Interstate that does not intersect with any other. In fact, all of I-97 lies in one little county just outside Baltimore.
Oh, and here's a direct link to a much BIGGER version (more pixels than can fit on your screen!)
Posted in: chaosboy, design, driving, united states on October 29, 2009 at at 9:13:00 PM