Transit Maps: Project: International E-Road Network Diagram, 2020 Revision

Finally! A comprehensive reworking and redrawing of one of my original projects – a diagram of the European International E-Road network. First drawn back in 2010, It’s a piece that’s always had a place in my heart, but I’ve always put off updating or reworking it over the years because I was just never quite sure how to bring anything new to the table.

However, the recent successful revision of my Interstate Highways as Subway Diagram convinced me that I could use that design language to reinvigorate this old project – and I think it’s definitely been successful! View the map in the window below – you can zoom in and out, pan around, and also go full screen. Or, you can also click here to experience the map in a full browser window.

First things first: this is unapologetically a diagram, not a map. The whole idea here was to fit as much of the network legibly into a square canvas as I could, which means that Eastern Europe and Russia get compressed horizontally – a lot. The Black Sea becomes taller than it is wide, and Turkey gets reduced to a fraction of its actual width. A comparison to the official United Nations map of the network (below) drives home just how large and empty the eastern part of the map would be without this compression (and how cramped Western Europe would be in comparison!), so I think some distortion is a fair price to pay.

A sidenote for those wondering how colours are assigned to the routes. The UNECE document that defines the network defines roads with numbers divisible by 5 (E-5, E-10, E-15, etc.) as “main roads”. These are generally the longest, and help define the shape of the overall network. These roads have been given bright, subway map-like colours in order to reflect their relative importance. All other routes are “intermediate roads”, and are given a subsidiary grey colour. Even-numbered routes (generally running east-west) are slightly darker than odd-numbered routes in order to tell them apart.

Looking back on the original map, there were definitely a few areas that I concentrated on for improvement this time around.

First, I designed the diagram to fit a specific canvas. Back in 2010, I just drew until I was done, and then added the final dimensions at the end to suit what I’d drawn. And it shows: there’s a big empty area of ocean to the left, and the whole thing just feels a bit unbalanced. This time around, I purposefully set out to make the diagram fit into a square canvas – and at the end, it fitted exactly as I had planned: no rescaling of elements or moving things around to make it fit. You can’t ask for better than that!

Secondly, I worked much harder at spacing elements more evenly across the whole map to miminise large empty areas. The same underlying 96-point grid that I used on my Interstates diagram informed a lot of my decisions here, which definitely gives more visual rhythm to the composition. Reducing Scandinavia’s overall size helped a lot, as it visually dominated the old version; as did moving Moscow further north (to somewhere approximating its spatially correct place).

Next: typography. The 2010 version used the ubiquitous and oh-so-dull Myriad Pro Condensed, simply because it was pretty much the only typeface I had at the time that was a) condensed enough to work on the map, and b) had a full range of characters to support the Eastern European and Turkish place names on the map. Now, just as my new Interstates diagram employs the official U.S. highway roadsign typeface “Interstate”, the new E-Roads diagram uses TERN – a typeface family developed by Erik Spiekermann for use on highway roadsigns in Europe. So far, it’s only been adopted in Austria and Slovakia, but it’s still a very appropriate choice for a diagram of European highways! Erik actually sent me this font family in return for a PDF of the original version of this diagram back in 2010, so I’m thrilled to be finally using it in this update! Comparatively, the labels are also set quite a bit bigger now, something I’m very happy about.

Because everything was fitting into place so well, I wanted to see if I could include secondary labels for place names if that country used a different alphabet – and that’s where I ran into some problems. While TERN supports Greek characters and has a wide range of diacritics, it doesn’t go any further east – no Cyrillic, and certainly no Georgian, Armenian, etc. In the end, I set most of these secondary labels in Fira Sans Compressed – it’s not an identical match, but as it’s also a Spiekermann-designed typeface, it bears many of the same design hallmarks and does the job pretty well. Some hunting around on the Internet revealed some appropriate fonts for the few labels that had to be set in more esoteric character sets. All these secondary place names have all just been pasted in from the relevant Wikipedia entries, so I hope there’s no errors (please tell me if there are!). Secondary names are also included in Gaelic for Ireland and Scotland, and in Welsh for Wales – just for fun. I did toy with the idea of showing the “alternate” names for cities in Belgium – the French names in Flanders, and the Dutch names in Wallonia – but that just seemed too fussy in the end.

Other improvements: I massively simplified the coastline this time around to be more in-keeping with the idea that this is a simplified diagram. There were definitely parts with way too much detail before! With one exception*, islands only appear if they have cities connected to the network on them – so no Balearic Islands or Cyprus or Isle of Man or random islands in the fjords of Norway. I’ve also made the visual distinction between routes across water that are actually served by a ferry line (a thicker line), and those that are just hypothetical joining lines between two otherwise disconnected points along a given route (thinner lines). I imagine that some of these could change in the future: until fairly recently, you could catch a ferry from Odesa, Ukraine to Samsun, Turkey across the Black Sea, but not at this moment in time.

One thing I wasn’t expecting at first was new extensions to some of the routes! E-16 used to run from Londonderry/Doire to Oslo, but now it runs all the the way across the Scandinavian peninsula to end at Gävle in Sweden. E-45 has been extended north from Karesuando in Sweden to pass through Finland and end at Alta, Norway. And finally, E-66 now completes something of a bypass of Budapest, running east and north of its old terminus at Székesfehérvár to now end at Szolnok. I was able to incorporate all of these amendments with a minimum of fuss, and I also double-checked and refined the intermediate routing of some roads for better accuracy than the previous version. I noticed that Google and Bing Maps have decided to extend E-86 into Albania from Greece, but I can’t find any official documentation of this change – its western terminus remains as Krystallopigi for now.

As always, your thoughts, comments and corrections are welcome! What do you think of the new interactive presentation of the diagram? Let me know in the comments below!

Note: * The one exception is the Isle of Wight, because the dent in the south coast of England up to Southampton (the Solent) just looked silly without it.