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The Stories in Maps
One of the most important stories a map can communicate is safety. An accurate storm prediction or street design has a huge impact on the wellbeing of the community. And a bad plan can cause great harm, like gerrymandering or redlining, cutting off resource access to vulnerable populations.A good map has the power to reveal these patterns
Before satellite imaging, getting accurate maps was tricky. But worth the effort, if you were trying to maintain a territory. There was an allocentric view with a neutral 'floating' perspective. that is not warped to a specific view for easy accuracy scanning.
After satellites and the internet, we started framing egocentric views. With augmented reality, you could filter a map to your specific needs. The only drawback is that it is harder to see connections and patterns of the city with such focused spotlights.
Most maps now, try to be very conservative with detail. There are so many ideas to communicate in a city. They tend to focus on water/land, and clean colored lines for the metro.
This evolution from allocentric to egocentric mapping represents a fundamental trade-off between context and utility. The old Roman map offers a rich, contextual understanding of the city as a holistic organism—how streets flow, how districts connect, the scale of buildings to plazas. This comes at the cost of immediate task-oriented utility.
In contrast, the Tokyo transit map sacrifices that holistic context for radical efficiency. It is not a representation of Tokyo's geography but a diagram of its movement patterns. The angular, colorful lines are a user interface for transportation. The drawback, as you noted, is the loss of connection to the larger urban pattern. The user gains perfect clarity on how to get from point A to point B on the train, but loses the sense of where those points actually exist in relation to the city's heart. The modern challenge is not choosing one over the other, but knowing when a user needs the full, contextual picture and when they need a focused, utilitarian tool.
For example, I'm 10 minutes out.......This is a way to communicate with someone about your location, by abstracting your speed and location to a simple time estimate.
Latitude
Being able to link time and location was a big breakthrough. This is what lead us to more precise long-distance travel and GPS.
Early Graphs
A lot of science is measuring the change between A and B over time. This was listed in detailed tables before data visualization.Some of the earliest graphs were sometimes called almanacs, to link the knowledge of map reading to the new application of reading numbers as stories through time.And Artist have polished this skill off over the years. For example, comic book artist developed different transitions to play with how people perceive time on paper.
The visual processing skills needed to read are very cognitive taxing. This can get in the way when reading is the means to accomplish another task. Human factor engineering principles can be used to reduce cognitive load and human failure.
This process of adding a visual channel is about more than just decoration; it's about constructing a shared cognitive scaffold. A well-designed graphic acts like a 'mind palace' built by an expert—it provides a consistent, efficient structure upon which an entire audience can hang their understanding and insights. The hard work of establishing the base relationships is already done visually, freeing up mental resources for deeper comprehension. This is the core of reducing cognitive load: the graphic does the heavy lifting of spatial and relational reasoning.
Furthermore, providing multiple channels of information—text, image, and eventually audio—ensures the message has the highest chance of reaching everyone. A user with dyslexia can anchor themselves in the visual model. A user with low vision can rely on the descriptive text (alt text) or audio description. By activating more than one channel, we move from designing for a hypothetical average user to designing for the beautiful diversity of human perception and cognition, making it work for most people, most of the time.
How do you distribute resources? One way is to use lines, look at the edges and borders they create. Where is the line between mine and yours? is it a blurry line? or very defined? Moving those lines can become very territorial.
Our concepts of ownership start at a young age, we get better at justifying why things should be a certain way, but it don't mean that we get away from that raw emotional possessiveness of young children. This is why some ownership disputes need a 'neutral' mediator, usually the law or governing bodies of society.
In the 1960's it was very hard to get pharmaceutical companies to invest in drugs that would only affect a small portion of the population. These drugs for rare conditions were 'orphaned', meaning that we had a drug that could improve the quality of life for a chronic condition, but no one would make it. So there was a campaign to change the ownership of drug design, as an attempt to use laws to drive behavior. The change was that if you did the research and development for a new drug you could have a patient that would monopolize your distribution in the market (for a few years). This was a benevolent attempt to get drug developers motivated to invest in small disease demographics rather than just leaving them neglected to die without hope. But now this model is abused. The strategy is to get ownership of a drug patent and never let anyone else make it. Not some of the money, ALL of it. Insulin takes about $10 to manufacture, but it is sold for hundreds. The price of not being able to pay that is unmanaged diabetes and death.
Cats are good boundary testers. If a cat is not allowed on the table, and they get punished with a water gun, they just learn to not get caught. They will just get on the table when no one is looking, not true obedience. When they are testing these constraints, the cat might try just puting 1 foot on the table to see if they can get away with it. If yes, try 2 feet, or start nudging something on the table. Finding the absolute maximum that they can expand the boundary of their territory, how much can the cat envelop the table into 'their side of the line'.
Humans also find these lines in relationship dynamic. like boss/employee, teacher/student, or parent/child.
The advice I have is to make that choice very clear. Both in the practical engineering and in the vibe that space gives off. In the examples, below the city is starting to build a model of high frequency tracks to build reliability that the community can trust.
Cities change slowly, a design from 100 years ago can still affect how things are today. When cities are designed to discriminate, these effects are hard to reverse. Tactics like redlining, or tearing down black communities for interstate connections still affect the way cities get built. One of the most damaging scars from bigoted design is squandered wealth generation in a community.
Transportation is one of the most important ways to get a resource or an idea from point A to B, if that is obstructed a system can't function well. When it is hard to access essential resources like clean water, safe homes, sustainable job opportunities, nutrition food or healthcare; what will happen to the community over time? This is the price we pay for bad design.
The legacy of discriminatory design like redlining is not just a historical scar; it actively shapes today's transportation failures. These patterns created isolated communities, and then the infrastructure built through them—like highways—further entrenched the isolation by prioritizing high-speed car travel between points over safe, efficient travel within communities. This is why the choice of 'who this space is for' is never neutral.
Zero-Sum Lane Distribution: One of the challenges of city street design is space limitation. A lane safe for pedestrians is not going to help move cars fast. Transit that can quickly move people is not going to work if it is always stuck in high congestion.You have to chose, who is this space for?
A six-lane artery cutting through a neighborhood isn't just poor UX; it's a physical manifestation of prioritizing the flow of through traffic over the safety and well-being of local residents. The transition from a car-centric street to a human-scale one is more than a functional improvement—it is a form of reparative justice. It begins to heal the urban fabric by reallocating space and safety to the people who live there.
But this city still priorities cars over human lives. There are parts of the city with 6 lanes for cars with speed limits around 30-40 MPH (about half of pedestrians die in 30ish MPH collisions, that increases to nearly 90% as the car gets to 50 MPH). A safer option would be to make the lanes more narrow and to build protected bike lanes/sidewalks. Make the design scream that this space is for humans. Make it feel not just safe, but pleasant to be out walking. This is one of those cases where UX design is bridging functionality and aesthetic.
Salt Lake City is build on a grid design. With two notable transportation hubs, the University of Utah and Temple Square. This line flow is unique in its artificial manufacturing. Human cities that are hundreds to thousands of years old tend to flow out of center cores organically like arteries out of a heart.
Because this grid design is so new in human city design history, it still has a lot to work out. One current challenge is to follow organic movement patterns on a euclidean base. For example, a major flaw in Salt Lake City is how a 15 minute car drive can take 2-4 hours on public transport. One main delay is awkward transitions between bus lines following the grid, instead of how people need to move around the city. Solving Salt Lake City's grid problem isn't just an engineering challenge; it requires designing a transit system that serves the organic, human needs that the rigid grid ignores, effectively bridging the gap between a city's artificial skeleton and its living, breathing population."
This map uses transportaion not as a mere aesthetic choice, but as a tool of revelation. The beauty lies in its brutal clarity: the 'rainbow' of options at the university doesn't symbolize robust service, but rather an excessive over-saturation of resources. The true focus of the graphic is the negative space—the vast, empty white gaps across the rest of the city. This emptiness is not neutral; it is an active void of opportunity. It represents the time, cost, and sheer impossibility of accessing jobs, education, and healthcare for those who live in the transit deserts. The map argues that transportation equity isn't just about adding more lines; it is about the deliberate and moral redistribution of access from the overserved to the underserved, making the invisible boundaries of exclusion starkly visible."
