Taking transit map wall art to the next level is this piece by Ian Reynolds, an electrical engineer and computer science student at MIT. Not only does it light up and look cool, but it actually queries the MBTA API to show the real-time position of trains on the system. Very awesome.

As Ian himself describes it over on Reddit, “The MBTA is a big part of life in Boston, and I built this as sort of a love letter to the transit system that we all know and love (to hate).”

Ian’s also written a longer article on Medium describing the process behind the map’s creation, which also has a short video of the finished piece. Hilariously, while I was watching the video, I was trying to work out which map Ian had used as his starting point. Was it the current official map? No. How about the old official map? Not that either. Hmmmmm… what could it be?

Turns out he’d based it off my map of the MBTA and I didn’t even recognise it. Talk about embarrassing…

Source: Ian’s Medium site via Reddit/r/boston