It's safe to say that I'm fascinated with the rich transit history of my adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon, and it's certainly something that I've explored before. This new project started out with a very simple goal – to produce a route map of Portland streetcars at their zenith in 1920 that showed each line separately – but it quickly grew into something much more.
Despite Portland once having one of the largest streetcar networks in the United States, finding reliable, empirical information about it is surprisingly difficult. Books about the history of the streetcar – like Richard Thompson’s series of books or John Labbe’s Fares Please! – tend to be more photographs and captions than exhaustive detail, internet sources are incomplete and at times contradictory, and even contemporaneous sources are frustratingly incorrect. A much-referenced Pittmon map of streetcar lines […]
Submitted by Tim C, who says: Here’s the route map of Whippet, Cambridgeshire’s “other” bus company. Frankly their route map is a far better effort than Stagecoaches! Brilliantly, their small buses are called Whippet Puppy, and when out of service their matrix displays say “Woof!” which is just fantastic. Transit Maps says: There’s a definite aesthetic appeal to this map, with an intelligent use of 30-degree angles and a nice hierarchy between the coloured (main) routes […]
Submitted by the author, who says: Dear Cameron, You’ll be happy to hear that my Luxembourg map is having a beneficial influence on the neighbouring communities. U-OV, the company operating buses and trams in Utrecht, Netherlands, recently commissioned me to build a new map for Utrecht based on the previous Luxembourg experience. This gave me the opportunity to explore all concepts further and since this week the new map is official and live 🙂 Here […]
A fairly bare-bones map showing the buses from the CBD and Central Station through Randwick and Coogee. It’s notable mainly for the inset that shows the service pattern in the city before the opening of the pedestrianised Pitt Street Mall (the main map shows the routing after the Mall’s opening). The Mall is now such an integral part of downtown Sydney that it’s sometimes hard to believe that it once wasn’t there. This map also […]
Now this I love! One of a series of posters celebrating the more relaxed pace of life along the northeast branch lines of JR East’s network in Japan. The posters are a collaborative effort led by artist Philippe Weisbecker, who has integrated (pretty detailed!) children’s drawings into the designs. Source: JR East poster website via Taras Grescoe/Twitter
Here’s a look at a new system map for Calgary’s CTrain light rail system, as spotted by Natalie Sit when boarding one of the brand new LRVs yesterday. Conceptually and graphically, it’s much better than the previous map (February 2013, 2.5 stars) but there’s also something a little weird about it that I’ll get to later. First things first! The big improvement in this map is the treatment of the downtown area, making it absolutely […]
