A design hinted at by Jug Cerovic after last year’s Transit Mapping Symposium, and seen in a photograph earlier this year has finally been made official. Here’s the new Singapore MRT map, currently only installed at the new Thomson-East Coast Line stations (Woodlands North, Woodlands and Woodlands South) but planned to be rolled out to the entire network. Of note is that the process for this redesign began way back in 2015 with a lot of public engagement and testing of prototypes — new transit maps don’t just happen overnight!
The first thing to notice is that the Circle Line is now actually a circle, which works fairly well for the most part: the stations along its arc are spaced out relatively evenly, and it seems to create a bit more space for the busier central part of the map. This allows a rudimentary representation of the Singapore River and Marina Bay to be added, along with little icons of sights in the vicinity. It’s a nice usability touch to help tourists orient themselves on an otherwise fairly featureless map. The prototype seen in the earlier photo showed the Botanic Gardens as a lonely green “parkland” area, but that seems to have been deleted for the final version.
Also interesting is that Singapore is now properly presented as an island, though a pretty roughly-drawn, blobby one that I don’t find particularly attractive. In reality, the eastern part of the green East-West Line out to Pasir Ris and Changi Airport shadows the coastline pretty closely the whole way: the map makes it look like there’s a giant empty “transit desert” in the island’s south-east quadrant! The addition of Sentosa Island and the connections from HarbourFront station are very welcome, however. Jurong Island doesn’t seem to rate, though… it can hang out with Tasmania and New Zealand as islands that get left off maps.
The presentation of the new Thomson-East Coast Line is perhaps problematic… it’s basically shown as if it was complete, without the usual dashed/faded/hollow line to indicate future sections under construction. Instead, all the stations that have yet to be opened have a brown “U/C” — for “Under Construction” — appended to their label. However, this code isn’t explained anywhere in the legend, which doesn’t seem very helpful to me. I wonder whether the maps are going to be updated by simply placing white stickers over the “U/C” labels as new stations come on-line?
Other quick notes: Line numbering seems to be de-emphasized in favour of line names and destinations now, with the numbered bullets at the termini much smaller when compared to previous maps. The numbered station “caplets” (to use official LTA terminology) are probably the best executed example of this style in the world: clear but distinctively designed, and able to handle multi-line interchange stations with aplomb. Addition of the future Jurong Region line looks like it’s going to be problematic within this framework.
The final word: A considered evolution of the existing house style, and one that’s definitely growing on me. I wish the island itself had a slightly more refined shape, but you can’t have everything. Three-and-a-half stars.
Just a note to say that Samuel Lim from the Singapore Land Transit Authority (one of the designers of the new map) will be at the next edition of the Transit Mapping Symposium, to be held in Seoul in April 2020, to talk about the work that went into it! We got a sneak peak in Montreal, so I’m looking forward to hearing him talk about the process behind this work.
The downtown area is now squashed into a smaller area than before. One of the principles established by Harry Beck in his London Underground masterpiece was to enlarge the centre. It’s now extremely busy around Clarke Quay and Downtown, with stations and captions far too close.
All the symbols are far too small, the prominent landmarks which look like clip art, hardly visible. Out-of-station connectors were better previously in black as the new coloured links are misleading. The Sengkang and Punggol loops are still shown wrongly as the service is four self-contained circles, not butterfly loops as shown. There are unexplained letter Cs and U/Cs alongside the Thompson-East Coast line which ends rather inexplicably in the middle of nowhere on one version I’ve seen. The Bukit Panjang loop has for some reason turned 90º anti-clockwise, why?
Together with an amateurishly drawn coastline its a disappointing result after 4 years work. Too many cooks?
However, there are many improvements too!
The whole map is now softer with larger circumference curves compared with the angular previous version.
The font is about 10% larger.
The Circle line now being circular certainly does provide more focus.
The downtown area is improved by the Raffels Place – City Hall axis being vertical as it is in reality, an important visual clue.
Being fussy, could they have centred the Circle line horizontally? And that coastline definitely needs more work, but the map is an improvement on the previous design. Its growing on me!