London
Harry Beck's 1933 London Tube map is a design icon, perhaps the first transport map to detail its subject matter topologically, not geographically. It was a radical premise but soon became standard.
Most Londoners know any effort to draw a Tube map geographically would resemble a multicoloured scrawl redolent of a kindergarten art class. With 275 stations on the network, the colour-coded Tube lines would appear too swirling and too jumbled, with some stations too near each other to read without a microscope. Leicester Square and Covent Garden would sit atop each other, as would Embankment and Charing Cross, Bank and Mansion House - as they do in real life.
By map, anyone trying to get from Bank to Mansion House, for example, would take the Central Line to Liverpool Street and change (about six stops). The savvy Londoner would just cross the road.
With 407km of track, suburban stations such as Mill Hill in the far north or Wimbledon in the deep south would appear yards off the map if drawn geographically.
While Beck's map smoothes out many kinks, some creases remain, not least similarly named stations in different locations. Tourists sometimes visit Edgware in suburban north London when they meant to disembark at Edgware Road in the centre. Then, of course, you have to decide which Edgware Road station - there are two of them, albeit a few hundred metres apart.
On the map, Kilburn Park seems miles from Kilburn. It isn't. Tired tourists also confuse Aldgate and Aldgate East. Though not far apart, there is a lengthy pedestrian subway system to navigate.
