Tube Map - Spin-offs and Imitations

Spin-offs and Imitations

The success of the tube map as a piece of information design has led to many imitations of its format. In 2002 Transport for London launched a series of London Buses "spider diagrams" to display at bus stops around the city, conveying bus route information in a schematic style similar to Beck's design, with straight lines and 45° angles depicting geographically distorted bus routes, coloured lines and numbers to differentiate services, and graphical markers to show bus stops. Tube and rail lines are not included, but interchanges are denoted with appropriate symbols by bus stop names, such as the Tube roundel. Unlike the traditional Tube map, the bus maps display services appropriate to specific transport hubs rather than a full network. Each map also contains a central rectangle of a simple, geographically accurate street map to display the positions of bus stops; outside this rectangle, the only geographic feature to appear on the bus maps is the River Thames. These maps are also available for electronic download, with map collections ordered by London borough. The bus maps were designed for TfL by the cartographic design company T-Kartor group.

An isochrone map of the network was made available in 2007.

In 2009, British Waterways produced their own map of London's waterways in a Tube-style diagrammatic map, depicting the River Thames, the various canals and subterranean rivers in the city.

The 'look' of the London Underground map (including 45 degree angles, evenly spaced 'stations', and some geographic distortion) has been emulated by many other subway systems around the world. While London Underground have been protective of their copyright they have also allowed their concepts to be shared with other transport operators (Amsterdam's GVB even pays tribute to them on their map).

In June 2011, British Designer Mark Noad unveiled his vision for a more 'geographically accurate' London Underground map. The map is an attempt to see if it is possible to create a geographically-accurate representation of the underground system while still retaining some of the clarity of Beck's original diagram. It uses similar principles, fixed line angles – in this case 30 and 60 degrees instead of 45 – and shortens the extremities of the lines to make it more compact.