Transit Map of Vienna (Redesign of the official map)

Vienna is a beautiful, if not the best city on Earth. Its public urban transportation is perhaps one of the most advanced among the world’s major and prominent cities and as cartographers we may approach the spatial character of the current transportation system differently. Considering the internal cartographic navigation, in my opinion, it is a very important component of the transport system, essential entrance gateway so to say, a visual identity and meaning as such.

It so happens that sometimes within the existing great possibilities, some services can work badly — in my opinion, the Vienna subway map, better known locally as Schnellverbindungen in Wien contains a huge potential to be a symbol of the city’s rapid transit system. However, due to many shallow and in addition sometimes very conspicuous mistakes and omissions, Wien is a long way from Moscow, New York, or London (these are well known for their subway identity) in the matter of its transit map quality. And the redesign of the Vienna subway scheme is the task I carried out in my project, trying not to invent from scratch a perfect scheme, but rather use what we already have and get rid of the problems step by step.

I was using Adobe Illustrator for the final drawing along with ArcGIS Vienna OSM Data to clarify and see the better visual deformation solution for the map. The final version of the map (was presented on the 30th of June, 2021 at a farewell meeting in TU Wien) is what I believe looks well-deserved for Vienna to be applied as its official transit map. The S-Bahn interconnection with the subway system became clearer, the colors and stops as well as transitions now are better perceived, labels are located with no rotations and the implemented generalization made it smoother to read and use. I am looking forward to developing the project further as the next semester may start.

The map was created within the class Project Map Creation at TU Wien in summer semester 2021.

Have a look at all the interesting details in the pdf (3.5mb).

Student: Iaroslav Boretskii