Transit Over Time

A history of Toronto's subway system

November 2019

The Toronto Subway has changed quite a lot over the years and while some might argue that it hasn’t changed enough recently I wanted to showcase exactly how much growth the system has had since it opened in 1954. This interactive information design piece includes every major addition that has been added since opening and also showcases the various different trains that accompany the time period.

This is interactive, give it a shot! Too small over here? Head over to the main website instead.

For the train illustrations I wanted to match the minimalist design of Beck styled public transport maps while also including enough detail to properly represent each carriage’s defining elements. The final illustrations keep a mostly consistent colour palette and line width while breaking from it where required to emphasize their differences. All of the train illustrations are based off of schematics sourced from Transit Toronto.

Illustrations of the Toronto Subway trains

The code for this project is open source and you can check it out over on my GitHub! It’s not anything especially fancy… just a Jekyll website. If you’ve found any issues please report them there!