Legible Cities

Desktop app

The pipeline that drew every map on this site, behind a window, for people who do not use a terminal. It runs on macOS and Windows. It is new: expect rough edges, and expect things to change between releases.

Give it a city’s published GTFS timetable and it makes the same things the atlas is made of: a schematic map straightened onto a 45° grid, and a running animation of the service day across it. Then it exports them as stills, reels and GIFs sized for Instagram, LinkedIn, Bluesky and X. Everything happens on your own computer.

What it does

Start from a sample city, one of the networks the atlas already draws: one press makes a project, downloads the feed and lays it out. Or start from your own feed, a GTFS zip on your computer or one at a web address.

A project opens as a notebook of six numbered cells, under a map that stays in view while you work down them:

  1. Data. Read what is in the feed: its routes, operators and service window, and the network drawn where it really runs. Choose which mode and which operator to keep.
  2. Process. Lay the network out, stage by stage, and read what the build had to fudge. The layout is computed once and stored, so every map and export drawn from it afterwards matches.
  3. Frame and service day. Pick the day the map is drawn for, scrub its clock, play the day and set the speed.
  4. Style. A dark or a sepia map.
  5. Lines. Each line’s colour, and the order the lines stack in.
  6. Export. A still, a reel or a GIF, from presets for each platform.
The Library with one project, LA Metro Rail, above a grid of sample cities: LA Metro Rail, BART, TriMet MAX, the New York City Subway and others, each saying which modes it keeps and whether it has been downloaded.
The first screen, with your projects, the sample cities and the feeds you have added.
Cell 01 open under the map of Los Angeles Metro Rail: the heading Where the routes run, the gtfs2graph and loom stages, counts of 114 stations and 6 lines, and the six lines drawn along their real courses.
Cell 01, Data, reading a feed before it is laid out, with the network drawn where it really runs.
A project named LA Metro Rail: six numbered steps down the side, all ready, and a dark schematic map of six coloured lines above the cells, with cell 02 open on a line of eight stages that ends Laid out.
A project as a notebook of six cells, under a map that stays in view while you work down them.
Cell 06 open: where the map was, a tall reel frame titled Los Angeles, Metro Rail, with bands shaded at its top, bottom and right edge; below it the preset reads instagram-reel, 1080 by 1920, video, MP4.
Cell 06, Export, previewing a preset inside its safe zones.

Download

Download Legible Cities from the Releases page, choosing the file for your computer from the release’s Assets:

The installers are not signed yet. The first time you open the app, macOS or Windows will warn you before letting it run. The install guide shows how to get past that warning on each system, what the app writes and where, and how to remove it completely.

What you need

Licence and credit

Free software

The app is released under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. Its source is on GitHub, and every release carries, beside the installers, the source of the GPL-licensed software bundled inside them. Every component the app bundles, with its licence, is listed in the third-party notices, which the app also opens from its own Settings.

LOOM — Hannah Bast, Patrick Brosi and Sabine Storandt

The schematisation inside the app is LOOM, from the Chair of Algorithms and Data Structures at the University of Freiburg: the same four stages described on the framework page, built as native programs for each system and bundled, so the app needs no Docker. LOOM is released under the GPL-3.0. Its Windows build uses the compatibility changes of Transport for Cairo’s Windows port.

Esri — Calcite UI icons

The four view icons in the animation page the app shows are Calcite UI icons, copyright Esri, redistributed unmodified under the terms of the Esri Master License Agreement. They are not open source.

The transit agencies

A map made with the app derives from the feed it was made from, and remains subject to that agency’s terms. The rest of the people this project rests on are credited on the framework page.