Submitted by David, who says:

Here is a map I made using the current Translink maps as the base-line. I decided to include trams and commuter rail as trams are in the process of being deployed in Surrey and by Granville Island, and I firmly believe we should invest in commuter rail more than just the WCE. As well, I made a lot of references to Vancouver’s and Canada’s histories, from recognising our Coast Salish peoples on whose lands we illegally live to recognising other Indigenous talent to recognising a milestone in the trans community and a milestone for North American Deaf peoples.

Due to the clutter, I increased the size of certain, important transfer stations and made sure to note trains, airports and ferries. Unfortunately, I could not figure out a better way to place some text aside from over the tram lines. As well, I got lazy and decided to not add green to the North Shore by Capilano and Cypress (that will be my first update).

Transit Maps says:

This is definitely a fun project that David’s taken on here, and he’s done a good job of building on the ever-improving Translink corporate style to create it.

However, I will note that he’s using his allowable space incredibly inefficiently. By my rough calculations, the title and two legend blocks take up over 29 percent of the space contained within the blue border around the map. The wide open spaces around Langley, which contains just five stations, uses another 11 percent or so. This means that over 40 percent of the entire map is doing very little work, while everything else is crammed into the remaining 60 percent (or less, as there are some other large empty spaces).

Here’s what I’d do to to balance things a bit better. Reduce the size of the legends (and the type in them, which is too large) and combine them into one box that’s no deeper than the right-hand one on David’s map. This should free up enough space to enlarge and respace the cramped downtown area of the map. The outlying areas could also be compressed more to help with this, although I understand that David is trying to indicate how the commuter rail services reach far-flung parts of Greater Vancouver.

Routes on David’s map are only indicated by colour, and a few of them are quite similar, making it tricky to work out which is which sometimes. He’s using a frequency-based system where a thicker route line means more service, but this should be made explicit on the map. Skytrain = thick weight line; trams = medium weight line; commuter rail and other services = thin weight line. Indicating the termini that each line runs between in the legend could also be helpful when there’s this many different routes.

I’m also intrigued by the use of Squamish othographic notation to represent the First Nation names used for the commuter rail lines. Personally –as a non-local – this makes the names almost impossible to read or pronounce, and I’d much rather a transliteration of the names into standard English characters. I know that some local First Nation people prefer this notation to capture sounds in their language that aren’t normally present in spoken English, but I do think it would present a comprehension barrier to any tourists visiting Vancouver. I’m genuinely interested in what others think of this approach when it comes to information design for the widest audience possible.