Great news for fans of London transport, and also fans for whining about how London gets all the transport funding: TfL has big plans.
The capital’s transport authority is currently putting the finishing touches to its shiny new forelock-tugging east-west railway, the Elizabeth line. There are also proposals for a new branch of the Northern line to Battersea, and an extension to the London Overground to Barking Riverside, on the table; plus longer term plans including Crossrail 2, a Bakerloo extension into darkest south east London and, most excitingly of all, more trams.
It can be difficult to envision how all that looks on the map. Lucky for us, then, that an amateur designer has been busy showing us. Ali Carr posted the Unofficial 2040 Tube Map to the Rail UK Forums earlier this year. Here it is now:
Click to expand.
Carr’s map builds on the existing tube map to show a whole host of proposals of varying degrees of probability. It shows Crossrail 2 snaking its way across central London:
It shows the new, Old Oak Common station:
It shows a pair of Northern lines, with the Battersea branch completed and the resulting services split in two:
It shows the Bakerloo line continuing south to Hayes, an eastward Crossrail extension to Gravesend, and a southern London Overground one to Thamesmead:
There’s even some stuff I hadn’t realised was on the table, such as an Overground extension to Hounslow, and the Piccadilly line extending to Ealing Broadway to simplify services on the District:
There’s something else it shows, however – not an extended line, but an expanded problem. Through no fault of Carr’s, parts of the new map are a bit of a mess. Consider the areas around Farringdon, Euston and Kings Cross:
Or the new Tramlink route from South Wimbledon to Sutton, which doesn’t seem to interact with the existing one at all:
Or the whole confusing mess of north east London, where multiple tubes and Overground lines are now competing with Crossrail 2 for space:
As I say, I really don’t’ think the problem here is with Ali Carr’s handiwork. Rather, it’s because the new map uses the existing one as a template – and the profusion of lines either newly built or newly controlled by Transport for London is making the map unreadable. The map is already losing the cleanness and simplicity that made Harry Beck’s original design so iconic. And the more lines it includes, the more cluttered it becomes.
If even a fraction of TfL’s plans come off, it might be time for a radical rethink.
Jonn Elledge is the editor of CityMetric. He is on Twitter as @jonnelledge and on Facebook as JonnElledgeWrites.
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All images courtesy of Ali Carr.
