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The Guardian

Twisted tracks: watch metro maps transform to real-life geography

June 27, 2017 | Society

Public transit maps occupy a unique place in the mapping world, and must strike a careful balance between readability, detail and aesthetic design. To that end, they necessarily distort the city’s true geography and with it, our own mental conception of the city too.

But just how distorted are the world’s metro maps? A recent series of animated graphics, created by the DIY cartographers of the online forum Reddit, answers that question. Scroll down to see the metro maps of six global cities transform to match their true geography.

As is the case with most metro maps, London’s iconic Tube map exaggerates the size of the city centre, while shortening and simplifying the lines radiating out toward its periphery. The prominent region enclosed by the Circle Line (the bottle-shaped yellow loop in the centre) occupies about 6% of the Tube map’s total area. In reality, it is only about a quarter that size. London’s Square Mile (the neck of the bottle) is only about one-sixth as large as it appears on the map.

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