Submitted by lukasmaps, who says:
I think I’m gonna hurl… Shows buses, but NOT the Metromover? Come on.
Transit Maps says:
Well, it at least shows the stations that you can transfer to the Metromover at (all two of them), so it’s kind of on par with the buses – no actual bus routes are shown, just a list of numbers at each station. Showing the Metromover on this map is problematic because of the disparate scales of the two systems: Metrorail has 23 stations along 24 miles of track, while the Metromover crams 21 stations into just 4.4 miles of track looping through downtown. Tricky to reconcile those, to say the least. If the map was better organised, a downtown inset could be the answer.
Like its predecessor (August 2012, 1 star), this map suffers from including an unnecessarily detailed base map: do we really need to see every marina, inlet, island, lake and river in the greater Miami area? The drab grey isn’t giving me any Florida vibes, either. The typeface used for labelling is an improvement (Interstate versus the previous Arial), but there’s a sense that everything has just been thrown on where it can fit. Redundant station/locality names don’t help this either: two “Brickell” labels right next to each other? The station names already reflect the locality (or at least they should), so I don’t see a need to double up. Some labels end up under a legend box or even under the route lines, which isn’t very helpful.
The haphazard placement of labels means that some information takes too long to find. A stylised “e” symbol denotes a station that’s served by Downtown Express trains, but that “e” is often placed far away from the station it’s meant to tied to. Why not just put the “e” symbol on the station dot? Or put a small black dot in the centre of the station dot? Information like this should always be placed consistently so that it’s easy to find.
I will say that the depiction of the airport transportation options is much better: the MIA station is really a proper transit hub now (even more so when Amtrak trains start calling there in the near future), so it’s good to see it getting some love.
Our rating: An ever-so-slight improvement on the previous iteration, so a begrudged one-and-a-half stars.
Source: Miami-Dade Metrorail website