Subway Maps to Scale

Joshua Keating points me to an interesting series of subway maps done at scale. Normally you see “maps” of metro systems that are really schematics, designed to be clear and readable, rather than geographically accurate representations. Some of the contrasts are very interesting. Here, for example, is Washington, DC where a relatively sparse five-line system is covering a huge area:

Compare that to the much more compact system in Osaka:

That’s a good illustration of the point you often here that Metro is really a hybrid system with many attributes of a commuter rail network rather than a traditional subway.