He's Only Visited Two Countries, But He's Drawn 220 Subway Maps — Including 40 Chinese Cities | 100 People With Ideas

Passion can make even unremarkable design bloom.

If he hadn't drawn those 220 simplified subway maps, Peter Dovak would still just be a project director at a transit rail equipment company in Washington, D.C. Neither his college major nor his job had anything to do with design; graphic design was a hobby he pursued after hours, one that brought him the odd piece of freelance work on the side.

But he may now be one of the best-known graphic designers in the world — because of his love for public transit.

His personal site lists more than 20 design projects, all of them about transportation. They are hardly exercises in creativity; they look more like catalogs of vehicles of every kind. In one image he lined up the fuselages of more than 100 airlines; in another he "recreated" the look of every mode of public transit in America's major cities.

Even the project that first brought him a bit of fame — the city Mini Metro maps — isn't especially complex. Really, all he did was simplify and shrink the original subway maps. On average, each map took him less than an hour.

Some cities have dense, tangled networks — Tokyo, Shanghai, Seoul, Paris — and those cost Peter two or three hours. But most cities have one line or a few scattered ones, like Hefei, Seattle, or Glasgow, and he could finish those in minutes.

How complicated a city's subway network is largely decides how good its mini map looks, which leaves Peter little real "design space." Every map is shrunk to fit inside a 120-pixel circle, with 3-pixel-wide lines spaced 3 pixels apart, turning only at 45-degree angles.

The drawing rules are identical for every map, yet the layouts and the paths of the lines differ so much that anyone who knows a city can recognize it at a glance. For the people who live in it, a city's public transit system is shared space and shared memory.

This was also the first time his work drew attention on this scale. If there is one thing that makes these designs valuable, it may be the sustained obsession with subways they reveal.

Peter says the project began with a failure.

Last year he set out to build a phone app about the Washington, D.C. metro, but his patchy coding skills left him stuck at the prototype mockups — the part he was actually good at. Still, after drawing a tiny icon of the D.C. metro, he was surprised to find that even at that size the system's complicated layout stayed easy to recognize.

He found real pleasure in these sprawling colored lines, so he took on the hardest case: the New York subway. It not only crisscrosses in every direction, its official map is laid over a map of the city, which makes it harder to read. Peter had to shrink the map and keep every line recognizable at the same time.

The result was good. His mini map of the New York subway clearly shows what the original looks like, and it also lets you picture the city's center and its edges — most lines meet in Lower Manhattan, few pass through the middle of the island, and nearly all the connections to the boroughs outside Manhattan happen down there too.

The same holds for the series of maps that followed: each one shows how people move around a city, and the number of lines shows which transit plans the city's planners put first. Phoenix, Arizona, a car-dependent city, has a single line. Berlin does far more for people who take public transit — several lines cross the city center, and a ring line makes it easy for residents to reach any part of town.

More than design skill, this project tests patience and observation. Peter has both. He doesn't travel much — he has left the country only twice, once to Japan and once to Canada — but whenever he does, transit is what he watches. On earlier trips to cities he didn't know, he worked out the public transit system fast enough to end up giving directions to lost tourists.

The patience shows in the time Peter has put in. He started with Washington, D.C., and in his spare time kept adding maps for more cities; within a year he had more than 200 little round icons.

The app still hasn't been built. But the design side of it, the part about transit, has gone much further.

Peter's attention moved from individual city subways to the growth of China's subways. Year by year, from 1990 to 2020, he updated and broke down each year's network, and made a GIF animation of how subway construction in China has unfolded.

If the Mini Metro project compares urban transit planning across cities side by side, this one lays out on a timeline how transit in one country — or one city — has changed.

"China's pace of development used to be middling, but over time it became exponential, and passed every other country in the world. In the thirty years from 1990 to 2020 alone, the number of Chinese cities with a subway system will go from three to more than 40 — and that number will keep growing," Peter wrote in a summary on his personal site.

Yet this bearded American has never set foot in China, and what he knows of its subways stops at a vague impression.

While gathering material he pulled as much as he could from the internet — most of the data from Wikipedia and a site called Urban Rail — but English-language sources always had gaps, either out of date or not matching the real place names. A Chinese subway enthusiast cleared up some murky details in Peter's first version and corrected his mistakes.

The language barrier caused plenty of trouble, but Peter still chose China as the first stop for this more advanced version of Mini Metro. The reason was simple, and entirely practical —

Other developed countries built their subways across too long a stretch of time. Visually, the result isn't good. Boston opened North America's first subway tunnel, the Tremont Street Subway, in 1897, and only afterward did the U.S. gradually extend subway lines into Chicago, New York, and other cities; outside a few major cities, most American subway lines are short. Peter needed to leave the harder cases for later. Which country to pick, he hadn't decided.

China, on the other hand, is a country where urban rail lines have appeared in city after city in a short time. Even before this project, his work had already told him that China was going through enormous growth; the high-speed rail projects launched one after another in recent years had become one of the country's calling cards to the world.

Peter was also struck by a country with such brand-new rail systems, and above all by how often new lines appeared there in so short a time.

"The subway system was probably expanding a lot in China too — I just didn't know whether it was being built as fast as the high-speed rail," Peter said.

The Mini Metro project confirmed his guess about the country; the "History of China's Subway Development" that followed was a more systematic visualization.

As his animation shows, before 1990 only Beijing, Tianjin, and Hong Kong had subways, their first lines opening in 1969, 1979, and 1984. Tianjin's first line closed for renovation in 2001 — a detail Peter's map also captures.

By 2015, China's urban rail network had grown to 3,300 kilometers in operation, nearly 1.5 times its length in 2010. By 2020 that figure will nearly double again. Peter knows exactly what those numbers mean — he can tell you, year by year, which lines were added and which were extended at either end.

The United States, the second country in the world to build a subway, stopped building heavy rail (a term synonymous with metro) long ago. Most American rail transit is now light rail. "They're not as good as a real subway system," Peter said.

By the International Association of Public Transport's definition, the main difference between light rail and subway is whether the track is dedicated: light rail shares its track with other traffic, while subway track is dedicated, runs mainly inside a city, offers more frequent service, and carries more passengers.

High capacity and frequent service are why Peter thinks subways are "better." He also hopes more people outside China will see that the country's sweeping transit change is still going on.

After design sites like Curbed and ArchDaily covered these two projects, several design firms offered him jobs. Peter turned them all down.

He has never thought of himself as a graphic designer. In college he majored in Japanese and international economics; he liked to draw in his spare time, so he taught himself to make things in Photoshop.

After graduating, Peter interned at the Japan-America Society of Kentucky, where he made a brochure for the organization. His supervisor, surprised by his knack for marketing materials, urged him to take it further. Peter taught himself everything online, and the software he worked in grew from Photoshop to Illustrator. For subject matter to practice on, he picked the thing he was already obsessed with: public transit.

Over several years, in odd bits of spare time, Peter put together more than 20 projects, and picked up at least some knowledge of the rail structures above and below ground in several American cities.

But he has always kept work and hobby apart. As a project director, his job is mostly promoting rail systems — the pay is good, and he likes the work.

Peter isn't thinking of becoming a designer — he doesn't want the trouble of dealing with clients. Even Paul Rand, America's most distinguished logo designer, admitted that handling clients takes "political, social, and aesthetic" means, and is a hard problem.

For Peter, design is a way of looking for common ground. He posts every piece of work on designer sites like Dribbble and Behance, on his social media accounts, and on Washington's local transit forums, and he reads every comment and suggestion from other users and transit enthusiasts.

"Some of the criticism is pretty harsh, but I'm still happy to see people so interested in public transit," Peter said.

His recent projects have brought him attention and a little money. His designs have been printed on posters, T-shirts, mugs, and phone cases, and more than 500 pieces of merchandise have sold. He doesn't handle the printing or selling, and it costs him nothing — he only supplies his files to print-on-demand sites like RedBubble or Society6.

All his design ideas, Peter says, come from his obsession with transit. His design skill only makes the work look "nicer"; what drives him to make it is the transit system itself.

That has earned him the label "transit nerd," and in his interview with QDaily, Peter used it about himself more than once.

This kind of fascination with transit is not rare among Americans. You could say his obsession is something handed down by family and by the society around him.

In the U.S., almost every major city has its own local transit club or online forum. Peter often contributes his thoughts on public transit to Greater Greater Washington, where he has met plenty of fellow enthusiasts. Beyond city-focused outlets like CityLab, many private blogs run by transit obsessives serve as gathering places for people looking for answers or for company — the blogger behind Pedestrian Observation, for instance, was a mathematician and now gives professional advice on urban transit infrastructure.

There is no denying that people's first fascination with public transit owes something to the confidence the railroad hauled in with it.

In 1828 the United States built its first railroad, running from Baltimore to Ohio. It showed off the country's proud industrial achievement and set off a rail mania that lasted a century. A classic example Americans are even prouder of: the "Black Ships" incident, when U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry sailed his fleet into Japan's Edo Bay and gave the shogunate a model steam locomotive, forcing the country open.

The standard historical account holds that the railroad was central to the growth of America's national market, a textbook case of organizing and managing a large corporation. It cost enormous sums and took the whole country, or a great many people, to build, and simply finishing one gave citizens great pride. By carrying large numbers of people and large volumes of goods between the interior and the ports, it also changed, to a considerable degree, where people moved and how the economy developed. In 1944 the American economic historian Leland Jenks argued that the railroad had a direct effect on the growth of U.S. real income and on economic expansion.

America's railroad fever stopped for a time in the Panic of 1873, and after World War II the railroads lost passengers to highways and airplanes squeezing them from both sides — but even their decline became a concentrated illustration of the merits and defects of a privatized economy.

Railroads still have their followers among ordinary people today.

Peter's father is one of them, and his influence on Peter has been the most direct of all. As a boy, Peter often crossed state lines with his father to look at trains and collect models. Later he joined his father's local model-train club, which had plenty of other father-and-son pairs like them.

His father preferred freight trains. They make up most of America's rail network, still carry nearly half of all freight, and continue to play an important part in the U.S. economy. An article in The Economist about high-speed rail declared that the United States has the most powerful freight rail system in the world.

Peter developed a different taste and fell for passenger trains. They are not common in the U.S., and the network is not well developed — the only intercity passenger rail operator is a company called Amtrak, and Peter once drew every one of its train models.

He used to live in Louisville, the largest city in Kentucky. It has a million people but one public transit system, which reaches a limited area and isn't used by many residents. Like a great many cities in the American Midwest, Louisville is a car-dominated city.

From birth until he left Louisville for college, Peter rode a bus with his mother exactly once, and only in order to observe it. By the time he was in high school, that route had been discontinued for lack of riders. Watching other kinds of transit was something he could only do on trips out of state.

Then Peter moved to Washington for work.

In a city he considers to have "busy public transit," he moved into an apartment building near a subway line. It was expensive, but it satisfied his habit of watching transit up close. His one regret is that the small apartment has no room to lay out models the way his father does.

He came up with a romantic idea: print the mini metro map of every city he has visited, frame it, and tuck a round-trip ticket stub inside.

Cover image from: Transit Oriented, Upslash