There will soon be new Paris Metro maps floating around thanks to the efforts of Benjamin Suchar and copyright laws. Suchar designed an app called CheckMyMetro, which is like Twitter specifically for events on or around the metro. You can post about incidents (slow traffic, accidents, etc), coups de coeur (likes), coups de gueule (rantings/dislikes), or even musicians playing at the metro stations. Although, as expected from Parisians, I've seen mostly coups de gueule. But after being banned from using the well-known metro map from RATP, the public transit authority in Paris, he decided to hold a competition for designing a new metro map. (I hope they are okay with me posting it here!)
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| The official RATP Paris Metro map. You can get the full brochure at their website www.RATP.fr |
There were over 80 submissions which were narrowed down to 10 finalists for final voting on Facebook. The winning map (see below) designed by Antoine Raby was announced in December.
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| The winning Metro map for CheckMyMetro. |
Overall, I like the new map. It is both tourist- and resident-friendly because it indicates locations of major monuments, have scaled distances between stops, and include the arrondissement (districts) where each stop is located. My favorite part is that the colors stay true to their respective lines. Each line (on maps and in the metro) have a unique color associated with them (line 1 is yellow, line 9 is yellowish-gold, line 3 is brownish-gold etc...) My friend had a metro map where the colors were different than the "official colors" and it was very confusing because I would follow the wrong lines. And unlike RATP, Suchar is okay with this map being distributed since he is a supporter of open data, something I can definitely get behind.
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