Call me traditionalist but I quite like <a href="http://www.wtr.ru/moscow/eng/metro/metro.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.wtr.ru/moscow/eng/metro/metro.html</a><p>The columns make it much faster to scan over station names. And its got local character while the other just looks like any other western metropolian map. The new one looks tentacly somehow. The "connectors" on the old one are great.<p>Oh, it's just an Artsy Lebedev project...
Comparing the proposed map with the current map (the 2nd map in the article), it's clear that the river provides scale and locality, allowing better association with one's mental above ground map.<p>Put back the river, and the proposed one would be better. Without it, a tremendous amount of context is lost.
Another recently developed alternative by Ilya Birman:<p><a href="http://ilyabirman.ru/english/moscow-metro/" rel="nofollow">http://ilyabirman.ru/english/moscow-metro/</a><p>And another one by Viacheslav Ilinskov:<p><a href="http://www.artdragon.ru/" rel="nofollow">http://www.artdragon.ru/</a><p>IMO, both are better as far as the aesthetics of the connecting stations is concerned.
"the studio has an excellent play by play of its design process, which seems rather courageous in a country that doesn't exactly encourage the sharing of information"<p>Now that's a quite broad generalization.
Another one that <i>does not look</i> like a Soviet relic, or like anything else at all: <a href="http://pics.livejournal.com/mi3ch/pic/00324y15" rel="nofollow">http://pics.livejournal.com/mi3ch/pic/00324y15</a> (from <a href="http://mi3ch.livejournal.com/1038793.html" rel="nofollow">http://mi3ch.livejournal.com/1038793.html</a> [ru]). Not that I would use it as a map, exactly...
It must be nice, having a metro system where your biggest concerns are the spatial and typographic qualities of the map.<p>There are stations (perhaps entire lines) on the our very own Chicago Transit Authority that look a lot more like a Soviet relic than that old network diagram.