- “The map is the network,” Cerovic told me. Above ground—whether in a car, on a bike, or on foot—you can go in any direction you’d like, he said. But that’s not true underground. “When you go into a station, you enter into a parallel dimension … it’s a totally different concept of space and time. Without the map, you can’t use the system. It’s essential.”
And how that map appears has implications, he says. In Paris, where he grew up, he had the 1990s Métro map: “That is the way I see the system, when I think of it.” But friends of his who moved to the city in the 2000s or thereafter know a different Métro map, which, in London fashion, added new lines and services. “These people have difficulties navigating certain places, and avoid others that appear too cluttered on the map,” he said. “Because that’s the way they see the system.”
Cerovic laughed when I asked about London. “Only in New York and London do they care so much about their maps. Nowhere else do they care this much.” (He’s got a point: Last week, the New York Times recently had an interactive feature on the development of New York City’s subway map. Readers loved it.) He described London’s Tube and Rail map as “frightening”: “I don’t want to go there when I see it.”