Subways are usually visualized as schematic maps where the lines and locations don’t show the real geographic location. Further, metro systems are huge infrastructure elements but, as most of them are buried underground, we aren’t really aware about how large and extensive the subway networks are in reality. I had the idea to draw the subway lines on aerial images to show their geographic characteristics and I implemented it for Seoul, Busan and Daegu.
Origin of the Idea and Feedback
A couple of weeks ago I saw images showing the subway lines of London, New York City and Paris on this Twitter account. A few other people created similar images of other cities and I enjoyed them a lot. I had the idea to create something similar about Seoul and to share it with as many people as possible to show how great Korea subway system is and how Korea’s subway lines look like in reality.
The biggest difficulty was to find suitable picture while drawing the lines on the map was relatively easy. It was impossible to find a good aerial picture that shows the complete capital region. I assume that the area is too big to include in a single picture. And I wanted to draw the two subway lines of North Korea’s capital Pyongyang but no success as well.
After I published the images on our Twitter and Facebook, I received a lot of good feedback and many people enjoyed this new view of our familiar subway systems. The Korea Times contacted me after I published the Seoul subway image and they printed it together with a brief interview. Last week I also joined Koreascape on tbs to talk about the images and other current developments in Seoul.
Seoul Subway
Here’s the first picture I created with the overlay for Seoul:
You can see Seoul Subway Line 1 to 7, 9, the airport express line A’REX, Gyeongyui/Jungang Line and the new Ui Line. The image features southwestern part, downtown and the northwestern part of the capital region. Drawing the subway lines made me aware of some unique features of Seoul Subway: The loop at the end of Line 6, the detour of Line 4 to Sinyongsan Station and Line 5’s several turns on its way through the city.
A picture I haven’t yet released shows Seoul with a focus on Gangnam:
It nicely shows the major subway lines of southern Seoul: Bundang Line and the Sinbundang Line. Yet, it also doesn’t show Line 8 and the eastern part of Seoul.
Busan Subway
After the first Seoul subway image, I worked on applying the same concept to Busan and Daegu. Busan has a very specific topography and the subway system goes around various mountains:
In the picture the Busan-Gimhae LRT is missing. Busan’s Line 1 comes from southwestern area and extends northeastern outskirts of Busan. Busan Subway searches its way through the hilly topography of Busan, avoids all the mountains and the coast which leads to a very interesting picture.
Daegu Subway
Daegu has three subway lines and a unique feature is that the third line is an above-ground monorail:
Here all three subway lines of Daegu are shown in the picture. Daegu is huge in terms of urban land area but the subway system is relatively small. Line 3 is a above-ground monorail which is unique for Korea’s subway lines. It opened in April 2015.
So, these were the bird’s eye-view pictures of Korea’s subway lines! I hope that you enjoyed them and that we can soon show you more interesting content illustrating how great public transport in Korea is.
That’s a unique perspective. It really does bridge the system with the real world in which it’s built. Nicely done :) It reminds me of another map from a few years back. Perhaps you’ve seen it? https://www.notefolio.net/PEP/31026 While the stylized system maps are useful and pleasing, it’s also fun to see the system in reality sometimes. Yours captures it very truthfully, and I think this other map is a nice balance between the two as well.
I couldn’t find your episode on TBS though. Could you possibly post a direct link or episode date? Thanks.
By the way, that Busan map you made is particularly striking thanks to the mountains and water :D
Dear Phil,
thank you for the comment. I haven’t seen this map but I also liked the schematic map of Seoul by Jug Cerovic (which then Naver took as their base map on Naver Maps). http://www.jugcerovic.com/maps/seoul-metro-map/
Sorry for not providing more detail on the TBS Koreascape episode. It was the Thursday episode (August 9th) and you can listen to it here (works only in Internet Explorer for me): https://tbs.seoul.kr/player/replay.do?playType=AOD&fileUrl=rtmp://58.234.158.60:1935/eFMAOD/mp4:efmaod/2018-08/20180809_093000_PG2060746E.mp4&channelCode=CH_E&programId=PG2060746E&boardCate=05&bseq=1880
Love this so much since you first posted them. Would love to see it with Incheon (where I live) and the other parts of Gyeonggi if you ever have time. So cool!
Dear Kyle,
thank you for the comment! It’s really difficult to retrieve suitable pictures of Incheon and Gyeonggido. I searched a lot :( If I ever stumble across a nice picture, then I will try to add it and send you an email!
Cheers,
Nikola
It would be neat to draw these lines on Google Earth. Then we could zoom and rotate and move all around the map imagery. Could even take “tours” of the lines themselves. I played around with this last week. It’s a pain in the ass to draw the lines manually but there’s a public transport layer that shows all the metro stations. Can more or less just “connect the dots” that way though it takes time. Or who knows, there might be a layer already made by someone out there. I was surprised Google Earth itself didn’t have such a thing built in.
Hey Sam!
Are people still using Google Earth? :-)
The last time when I cleaned my laptop a couple of weeks ago I discovered that I had Google Earth and couldn’t remember why. I used it a lot a couple of years ago but then it became slow and the development of a Pro version also made it less attractive. A big disadvantage was sharing of files in Google Earth felt annoying (creating a .kmz file and sending it over). So I’ll have the same issues for creating the Korean subway lines in Google Earth.
Cheers,
Nikola
@Sam (my computer is acting up, I can’t be sure if this reply is directly to Sam’s comment, or a new one itself)
for what it’s worth, I actually did take the time to trace pretty much all of Korea’s rail lines in google maps. I’m not sure they’re 100% accurate, but if you (or anyone else, for that matter) was interested I’d be happy to share the .kmz.
@Nikola – I still use Google Earth and love it. The Pro version is now totally free and although you still have to export KMZ files, those files can be easily embedded in Google MyMaps for display/embed on the web. Much nicer now than it was in the past.
@Tim – That would be very interesting. Why not add it to a MyMap and embed it on your blog or just plain send the link to interested folks (Reddit maybe?). Maybe Kojects would be interested in embedding it on their blog haha (I know I would if you wouldn’t mind. I’m a sucker for stuff like that). Plus once you’ve got it on MyMaps, interested users can download the KMZ from there to open in their own Google Earth instance, because let’s be honest it looks way cooler in Google Earth. Can take some fantastic screenshots from within there too.
@Sam – okay, I’ll look into doing something like that. Never really expected anyone else would be interested in it (I thought other people probably had a better way of getting the same information), so I’ll clean it up a bit first and then find somewhere to upload it, hopefully within the next week or two.
Nicely done! It would be great to make a sort of interactive map with the rails.