BRAIN DRAIN

Back in October, Penguin published a book about the design that goes into subway and similar transit systems. As part of the marketing effort, they also released an e-card of the diagram above, reproduced from the book’s opening page . Obviously, it looks just like a generic mass transit system’s map. As the caption explains, however, it’s really an inventive map depicting cities that already have (or are planning to build) some urban railway system or other.

The cities do appear to be grouped together based on their actual geographic location; apart from that, there doesn’t appear to be any particular rhyme or reason to the layout of the passages, nodes and terminal locations. All the same, the map does evoke a certain appreciation of how interconnected the world has become, and makes one wonder what a more “accurate” map of this sort — depicting the relative sizes of each transit system as well as true transborder railway connections — might look like.

(From the look of it, though, the map already seems to get Manila’s location in the grand scheme of things quite right.)

[Via Strange Maps]