please empty your brain below
It could be argued that DLR and maybe trams should have same modal priority as underground. Also equate overground and tfl rail (with tfl rail evaporating over time into crossrail and overground), and Thameslink dead last (as well as breaking other rules)
And if riverboats were shown then shown at a low modal priority
Ironically, the paper map still survives for the mostly older, not so up on the smart phones generation. Exactly those who now can't read the current map without a magnifying glass.
I now have the Womble Song all messed up in my head though!
Some Russian designers did a phenomenal concept for a Parisian metro map, using the "correct" colours/graphics - TfL should go out to the design world and see what they come up with IMO.
So the boring answer is the designers and their managers will ensure big things like the Circle Line being on the top and the Overground being behind, but they're not bothered whether the different tube lines in Acton are above or below each other.
This likely makes some people here so angry.
I've been out to check the poster map, and things are even more divergent than I first thought.
It can't be too much to ask for vertical exactitude and thank you for taking the time to find this out. Horizontal inaccuracies are part of the DNA and raison d'être of it but I fail to see any contextual, spacing or room to fit in station names reasons for up being down.
What a coincidence - I had just been thinking about this less than two weeks ago - how the lines were ordered (which goes on top of what)
I’ve been drawing my fantasy tube map on graphics software and asked myself how to order the lines. I had Crossrail (i have 6 lines!) on top, then Underground, then Overground, then DLR, then Trams, then other modes. Within modes was order of importance (how hypothetically busy each line was).
The layering in Acton is still a bit random.
Max’s book is indeed an excellent and thought-provoking read. Unfortunately it has provoked neither thought, nor understanding by those ‘in charge’, and I use that expression loosely, and those with contempt of layering discipline in the graphic programme.
Quite aside from that, there are those who think three-dimensional purity on an Underground diagram is important, though do they ask themselves ‘why?’ and what is the benefit. When one is in a tunnel, does it really matter? There is a school of thought that says the lighter colour (harder to discern) should always be on top, and I have some sympathy with that view. The very point of these diagrams is to make following the trajectory of the lines as easy as possible, but as the ‘design’ we have been enduring for about twenty years now fails in so many fundamental ways, I wonder whether three-dimensional faithfulness is that much of a priority. What to do with the Bakerloo and Jubilee at Baker Street?
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