I love mass transit. In any city where I get to use a subway, a light rail or a bus system, I spend a lot of time just staring at the maps, because they tend to be well-designed. Maybe it's just me, but I get more excited about using public transportation the more I look at a map.
So maybe we should be thinking more about that -- about inspiring people to use public transportation by making the experience look cooler.
Here's a slideshow of a bunch of maps and improvements of them, inspired by this post I saw on Treehugger today. If you don't hear from me for the rest of the day, it's because I'm clicking frantically through this slideshow, giggling like an idiot and listening to the Kingston Trio.
I think my favorite part is how the Zero Per Zero Tokyo map looks like it's from space, and the space map looks like it's the Tokyo map.
Sites worth visiting if you enjoyed the slideshow:
*Very cool artists' portfolio as an ASCII NYC subway map
*Historical NYC subway maps
*Zero Per Zero
*The world map of mass transit
*The tiled bathroom subway map
*The "Milky Way Transit Authority"
*A more useful online version of the NYC subway map -- with streets labeled!
*Blank book made from repurposed NYC subway map