February 27, 2006
Your Monday Metro Map Mashup
It's become chic to take the transit map of one's home metropolis and anagram the station names. Boing Boing has a remarkable collection of maps that have received the treatment, and when we learned of the craze, we wanted to jump on the bandwagon and give D.C. its own personal mixup. Just in time did we learn that the job had already been done. We like the results, although we are disappointed in the failure to dub the Woodley Park station "Do Gawk, My Rare Panda Looms" (thank you, Chris Snyder).
We may have missed that boat, but we love the idea of playing with subway maps, so we're going to try some transit transmutations of our own. We're simply shooting for fun and aesthetic pleasure, and if you have ideas for future rearrangements, do let us know. And voila, from DCist Amadie Hart, we give you our debut attempt.
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No no no! All wrong!! Completely wrong! Have you no sense of neighborhood equvalency.
Euston = Rosslyn
Finchley Road = Bethesda
St. Paul's = Capitol South
Aldgate = Eastern Market
Picadilly Circus = Chinatown
Camden Town (not that it's on your list) = U Street
Covent Garden = Georgetown (not that there's a Metro stop..)
King's Cross = Union Station
Barbican = Foggy Bottom (The Watergate is probably a sister building)
Oy vey - shall I go on?
There were several directions we could go with this. One was neighborhood equivalency. Another was geographic equivalency. Being lazy, we chose randomness.
Think of this as the worst of all worlds...I tried geographic equivalency, but didn't want to repeat stations. I also was trying to keep the line colors the same, but was flummoxed by the lack of an orange line on the Tube. Perhaps in the future we will be able to redeem ourselves.
I like it, Amadie; I'm going to print one out and hang it on my wall.
Crikey! Somewhere along the line we lost both the New York and Rhode Island Ave. stations. Do you have enough names left for those two?
Amazing how I'm certain I couldn't make one of these maps, but I sure as hell can f-up my own name leaving a comment, isn't it?
Man, I don't know where those stations are. Possible the gent we got our blank map from had it made before they opened. Of course, there are enough names in the tube system to handle our map about four times over.
Um, does anyone here know what an anagram is, or is it just me?
We weren't anagramming. That's been done, and done, and done.
i'm so over transit mashups. Boing-Boing ran these posts into the ground, and you've done nothing but kick the dead horse. yawn.
I like transit mashups :)
I never saw the Boing Boing ones though. This one was kind of cool, I had my London Tube map sitting right in front of me so I could follow along. I got confused though on the Blue and Yellow lines in Virginia. I'm guessing the desire to put Heathrow at National was the main reason for station order mixup.
One gripe, Queensway/Dupont Circle should have the special Station Not Open yet circle, since it doesn't open until May 2006 ;)
This was done randomly, so there's no secret wink-and-a-nod behind renaming Dupont Circle "Queensway?"
I'm confused, I used to get off at the Queensway stop all the time back in 1997. Is it closed for renovations or something?
It really was an accident. I moved the Notting Hill Gate station further down the line, because it is the intersection of the red, yellow, and green lines, which therefore placed Queensway at Dupont Circle.
I don't know why Queensway is closed, but the map I have from Oct 2005 has a big X over it and says Closed Until May 2006.
Reid, Queensway is closed for escalator work.
Nice work, Amadie. I'm only too sorry that the LU's "orange line" (East London) is the shortest line in the system, apart from the Waterloo & City Line.
If the 2012 Olympics-related LU expansion is implemented according to plan, however, I believe that the East London line will be extended in both directions to encompass a much wider geographic area than Shoreditch to New Cross. Some of the areas that it will stretch into, however, are a far cry demographically from their Fairfax analogues.