Metro Hours: a day underground in four cities
A metro system never has one speed. It wakes up slowly, surges at rush hour, settles into a midday plateau and fades out after midnight. Metro Hours turns that daily rhythm into a single shape you can read at a glance.
How it works
Each chart is a half-circle fan running from 00:00 on the left to 24:00 on the right. Every hour is one ray. Along the ray, the metro lines are stacked from the centre outwards in their official colours. The length of a segment shows how busy that line is, and the length of the whole ray shows the total load of the network. A grey dot means no service at that hour.
A note on the data: the charts are illustrative. They are built from typical weekday patterns and approximate ridership figures, not from official load statistics, so compare the shapes rather than the exact numbers.
Load charts like these are meant to live on the main metro map. Showing how busy the network is hour by hour gives passengers information the line diagram alone can’t: when the rush hours start and end, and when it’s easier to travel.
Each city comes as a full poster and a compact mini version, drawn in vector. More cities are planned.
