Here's an interesting way of re-designing the Tube map: by basing it on the time needed to travel segments rather than the current system of simplicity and ease on the eye.
The idea came about by a design student at the London College of Communication, who had to re-invent a design classic for a piece of work. Needless to say that due to a radically different objective, the result is also radically different, though this is helped by his "arty" side wanting to change the colours of the tube network, to be more "relevant". How basing them on the electromagnetic spectrum is more relevant is beyond me, simply as I'd have thought most people would have no idea what colour is at each end of the spectrum before they looked at this map. (Changing the colours is sacrilege in my eyes.)
However if we leave him alone on that issue, the result is highly interesting for anyone, with possible special interest for us lot.
http://www.oskarlin.com/images/timetravel.pdf
The map is centered at the school he attended which is close to Elephant and Castle, with that being zone 0, with all the following zones spiraling out from it in 5 minute intervals, however the map also has a scale, for you to measure those minutes in between the zones. (Although this is fairly logical anyhow.)
He has also produced one without the zones which can be found here, but this is far harder to use.
http://www.oskarlin.com/images/timetravel_no_zones.pdf
The guy had many comments on his blog after it had been published in a design magazine. Unsurprisingly many suggested that he should revert to the original colours, so he has! This is better.
http://www.oskarlin.com/images/timetrav ... olours.pdf
Unfortunately he hasn't made a traditional map with zones, but perhaps the damage has already been done. He hasn't really achieved his objective of "combining geographically accuracy with simplicity and time", but the idea is a very clever one. How effective it is to translate this idea to paper is also questionable but it has sort of worked, for what he wanted to achieve. There's no way that this could replace the current map as there would need to be a separate one for each station and the easiness of measuring time between zones would also have to be simplified.
So what's your view?