Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had “Deep Throat”. Here at CityMetric, we have “SameBoat” – the anonymous Wikipedia user whose redesign of London’s tube map was, we felt, so much better than the official version.

Deep Throat kept his identity secret for over 30 years, before finally coming clean as FBI agent Mark Felt in 2005. SameBoat, though, has come forward after barely more than a month. He’s the Hong Kong-based graphic designer and sound engineer by the name of Thomas Lee, who designs metro maps in his spare time.

Obviously we’re too modest to say that the whole affair shows we’re better reporters than Woodward and Bernstein. That’s for you to decide.

Anyway – the reason we can bring you this exclusive information is that, this morning, SameBoat got in contact to let us know that he’d done a “night tube” version of his map, too.

Transport for London’s own night tube map is a fairly significant redesign of its (increasingly, eye-gougingly awful) day tube map. SameBoat’s isn’t – it’s a version of his day tube map, but with most of the lines faded out. The goal, he told us in an email, was to keep the sense of how the lines interrelated.

Here’s the result:

Image: SameBoat/Wikimedia Commons.

And here, since you were wondering, is the official TfL version.

 

As to which of the two maps we prefer, we can’t quite decide. TfL’s night tube map is undeniably stylish. It shows the network with undeniable clarity, too. (Those are two qualities that have been singularly absent from the main tube map of late.) SameBoat’s amateur version is less polished.

And yet – there probably is some benefit in showing the lines that aren’t open at night. Regular traveller’s eyes will be instantly drawn to the part of the map where they’d expect to see their station. Showing lines as faded may actually communicate the idea of “no service” more quickly than not showing them at all.

Here’s what SameBoat (or “Lee”, as we should probably call him now) says about his latest map:

There is an ongoing debate [about whether] TfL should redraw the Night Tube map from scratch instead of basing it on the daytime version with all the seemingly unnecessary kinks for ducking the non-existent daytime elements.

I think making the map from scratch is much easier for the cartographers because there are only five main lines. But that would increase the travellers’s burden of knowledge about the newly twisted geography of the night time topological map.

I chose to preserve the daytime routes but make them much paler. [They] serve as geographic indicators without distracting readers from the night time routes.

Incidentally, Lee also noted that he was quite happy for us to describe him as an “amateur map designer”:

Harry Beck wasn’t a professional graphic designer to begin with, so I don’t feel any shame at all.

Fair point.

Here’s a clip of Sameboat’s new tube map. You can see the full thing here.

Want more tube maps? Really? Are you sure? Oh well, if you insist.