Submitted by alr2659, who says:

I found this map of the MBTA commuter rail zones in the Central Square T station on the red line in Cambridge. Strangely, this station does not have any commuter rail service, so I’m not sure why this was there at all.

I guess I’ll start with the obvious part: those colors are pretty hideous, and the mud-brown color used for zone 1A does a really good job making it difficult to actually see the line in that zone (which is a shame, since almost all of the system’s complexity is within this zone. Second, despite the zone borders wavering all over the place, the spacing between stations is not consistent. This is most apparent on the Lowell line – Wedgemere to West Medford is more than twice the distance from Wedgemere to Winchester Center. On the subject of inconsistent spacing, the space between station dots and their labels is inconsistent (an example of this that jumps out particularly is Wellesley Square in zone 3 on the Worcester line).

Labels in zones 1A and 1 go every direction imaginable, and the stop between Morton Street and Fairmount in zone 1 on the Readville line isn’t doesn’t even have one (and that’s not all – it doesn’t even exist yet.) And Fairmount itself – Zone 1 or Zone 2? (It’s actually in zone 1A, but I think this map predates that change.) My favorite station on this map, though, is Foxboro, in zone 6. It mentions that it is serviced for special events only, but not where trains come from to get there (Both from South Station via the Franklin line and from Providence via the Providence line). 

The geography of the coastline is very detailed; unfortunately, it doesn’t really resemble the actual Massachusetts coast, and even the parts that are recognizable aren’t in the right spots relative to the stations (Cohasset should be east of that peninsula that sticks up north). The rivers in the immediate Boston area are very detailed, but rivers elsewhere are simply omitted.

Having moved past the glaring issues, there’s not a lot of information presented on this map. For example, it would be useful to know that Amtrak connections are available at some of these stations, or some indication of service, since Framingham gets 43 trains on weekdays while Plimptonville gets 2. This map has the same problem as the rapid transit map that it is unclear which trains stop at Readville.

Transit Maps says:

Despite not being available anywhere on their website, I’m pretty certain that this is an actual official MBTA map, though it does seem a little weird that it’s not branded as such anywhere.

I agree with much of what has been noted above – the rainbow zones are both ostentatious and ugly, in particular – though I do note that a very similar diagram that was discussed in a Reddit thread three years ago has a label for the future Blue Hill Avenue station and draws the connecting route lines to Foxboro… so who knows what happened in the intervening years to delete them?

I agree that more information about connections would be nice, but adding frequency information is well beyond the scope of a simplistic diagram like this. Really, its only purpose is to assist with fare zone calculation, and that’s it.

Our rating: Yet another example of a zone map being the ugly stepsister of the transit map world. One-and-a-half stars.