PROJECT #020: TOKYOxMELBOURNE MAP
Sushi, shinkansen, and a seriously sexy subway system. As a public transit geek, I instantly fell in love with Tokyo’s mass transit network. Where else can you find such a clean, efficient, and easy to navigate system? And especially so for non-Japanese speaking and reading tourists! When sexy design is married with functional usefulness to this level, it's truly inspiring - a hustling, huge city this size with a train network that is punctual down to the minute is incredible, and the attention to detail is carried through to it’s mapping and wayfaring.
The Japanese hold zen-like simplicity in high regard, and this desire for simplicity extends to the allocation of alpha-numberic codes for each subway station. This simple act of definition works so effectively that it can be found throughout Japanese public transport networks. Seeing this idea work so well as I travelled through Japan, I wondered why we couldn't have something like this in my city, Melbourne.
Clearly factors such as population, existing infrastructure, and the public’s relationship with public transport drove the development of a Tokyo-style public transport system and its maps and guides, but what would a Tokyo-style system look like in Melbourne? This seed of an idea grew from there, and that’s resulted in mapping a Melbourne public transport network of similar scale as the Tokyo version but plonked around Port Phillip.
I started this project in late 2016, and worked on it over the course of about 2 months. This was one of those addictive projects I really got into.
In creating this fictional network, I brought up a map with all of Melbourne’s existing rail lines, and where there was a gap in the above-ground rail network, I drew an arrow as a loose alignment for a subway line. This was refined using locations for potential stations – for the locations of stations I loaded the post office and school locations as a rough representation for where population clusters/retail centres would be located.
Lastly, connectivity was considered, the locations of existing train stations and tram interchanges played a part in the final course of the subway lines. This subway exists in the same “world” as my 2048 tram map, so I incorporated that into the design as well. In visualising this network you have to picture a Melbourne that has a similar population density to Tokyo - think less sprawl, and a bit less centralised version of the city.
Aesthetically I tried to replicate the colour palette and typography of the English version of the Tokyo Subway map. One of the recognisable elements of the Tokyo system is the numbering conventions for the stations, which I’ve used in this version.
The more I worked on this project, the more I started thinking about how a real life version of this transit network would function, and to that end I went a bit past mapping for this project and started doing a bit more wayfaring design too.
And with that I think that was the aim of this map, to imagine a version of Melbourne that was as bustling as Tokyo, and how living in that type of city might look like.
