Someone at work emailed this around: A tube map where line length is equal to journey time.

It’s a bit of a botch, not least because the fact that the colours have been changed makes comparison with the original very difficult for anyone familiar with it. Nevertheless it’s an interesting idea.

A while back I thought of doing a similar thing, though I was coming at it from a different point of view. Here’s some background, you may want to skip it if you want to get straight to the idea. Getting a computer to work out the quickest way accross a network from point A to point B is pretty tricky, when the network starts to get have a large number of connections the number of options the computer needs to search gets big quickly, it’s not pretty. Though not quite as un-pretty as some other things.

Anyway back to the tube map.

I thought a good thing to do would be to get some string, one piece for each tube line, coloured appropriately. First you tie knots in each string. Each knot represents a station and the spacing is proportional to the journey time between them. Next you get the knots representing the same station on different bits of string and tie them together. So what you’ve got is a distorted London underground map made of string.

Why?

In case you haven’t allready figured it out this setup can be used to effortlessly compute the shortest route between two points on the network. All you need to do is grab the two knots representing the stations between which you wish to travel and pull them appart untill the strings between them are taught, that’s your shortest route. It’s a kind of highly specialised analogue computer.
Cool huh?
Well I thought it was cool.