Lisbon transit cartographer and designer Aurélien Boyer-Moraes talks learning to use a computer at 19, creating his first 3x4 ft. transit map of an imagined Brazilian city after reading Jacques Bertin’s Semiology of Graphics cover-to-cover, preempting Google Street View in Lyon with his 6x6 Seagull camera, ten years of designing transit maps for French cities with Attoma, and his heavily-annotated collection of 2,100 transit and city maps (which he might let you see someday.) See his maps at https://transit-map.com/Indented below are Aurélien’s notes on my notes (he is, as you can imagine, a precise man).

Transit maps originally designed by Aurélien

Metz, and Aurélien’s original design 

“The colors were imposed, there was no discussion, the use of these specific colors was mandatory because they were the new colors of the authority overseeing the transport in the agglomeration. They do not convey any specific information, which is against my general ‘credo’, but we had to use them in the map.”

Toulouse

“My map had a strong palette which was consistent with the offer (the headways and the span of service) as you can see in the original from sept 2013, but it was scrapped in-house.”

Dijon

“A picture of a bus stop with the maps displayed (plan schématique général and the city center) and a pdf of an early version of the paper maps as they were issued in three different configurations: North, SE and SW (SO for sud-ouest), only the geographic map changed accordingly, the plan schématique remained the same, it was the reference. This initial configuration was irrelevant for a city of this size (250,000 inhabitants), then they reversed back to a single issue with, on one side the schéma + the center + information, and overleaf the geographic map.”

Lyon, and Aurélien’s original design

Milan street map, completed in under two weeks
Lisbon bus, tram and subway map
Marseilles transit as of 1957
Vignelli’s 1972 NYC subway map (cropped seven years later without his input, quelle horreur!)

“I have a lot of respect for the early version of the map that the MTA committee led by Tauranac (with Michael Hertz as designer) released in 1979 (and was left almost untouched until the 1990s).One of the most relevant features of this map was the introduction of a very well thought out color code system by trunk in Mahanttan, which finally served also Vignelli since it makes his redesign of 2008 even more efficient! I am not a ‘blind pro-Vignelli, all against-1979 map.’ It is way more subtle than that.Although the 1979 map evolved in such a wrong way since the mid-1990s, that today it is a spaghetti plate, and the redesign—first with the weekender and then with the opening of the first section of the 2nd subway line (after the demise of Vignelli)—by Cifuentes-Waterhouse in 2017 is more than ever powerfull thanks to the work of the 1979 committee.”

Jarret Walker: a transit planning consultancy
Sanborn insurance maps of Manhattan
Two cartographers Aurélien would like to honor:



“A Frenchman (for once) civil engineer from the prestigious École des ponts et chaussées, from the 19th century Charles-Joseph Minard (1781-1870) whose work is stilll pretty obscure to the general public, I learnt about him while reading The Visual Quantitative Display of Quantitative Information by Tufte, and you can easily find information about his impressive charts on the www.”
“A Swiss designer (alive) who worked mostly in France, Rudi Meyer, he designed the 1976 splendid RER diagram and the French Railway system map that was on display from the late 1970s until 2011 in the trains.


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