Submitted by Daniel, who says:

The Alaska Marine Highway System is (to an outsider like me) super confusing. Their website has a map, but it doesn’t indicate which ferries connect which towns. But, this information is vital if you want to book passage — it appears to me that you can’t simply select two towns and hope that the system will route you along multiple ships; you have to know exactly which route and connection you want. You could spend a while (as I did) digging around the ship schedules, but there they don’t tell you the names of the towns, instead using 3-letter codes. I’m not sure how people manage to figure it all out.

So, I decided to try and organize some of this information for fun. The schedules and ships seem to change a fair bit, so I expect this one is already uselessly outdated, but I enjoyed the exercise. Useful information that’s missing: which direction the ships are going on one-way connections, as well as service frequency (some of these voyages happen daily, some happen every couple of weeks). Perhaps I’ll pick it back up again someday and work on those issues =).

Other random notes: The type is set in Mostra Nuova. I’ve vastly distorted the scale of the Inside Passage to try and capture all the complexity there. The linework is all simplified based on circular arcs and straight lines.

Transit Maps says:

For those who aren’t familiar with his work, Daniel is a real cartographer, and a bloody good one at that. He’s responsible for these subway map-styled maps of the rivers of America (which actually predate this blog, which is the only reason I haven’t featured them), and one of my absolute favourite maps ever: a linearized Lake Michigan. He’s also extremely generous with his knowledge of the technical aspects of mapping in the computer age – check out his #practicarto tag on Twitter for all sorts of bite-sized tips and tricks.

Now, onto the map! Daniel’s absolutely right when he says that trip information on the Alaska Marine Highway System (AMHS) website is difficult to find and make sense of. They break the system down into three regional areas, rather than providing any route information, and their map just draws undifferentiated blue route lines between destinations with no indication where each route begins and ends. 

So Daniel’s map fills in the information gap quite nicely, with routes shown clearly and distinctly. An obvious addition would be an explicit mention that the map shows summer sailings, as services are heavily reduced in the harsh Alaskan winter. The simplified coastline is neat and stylish, though the Art Deco typography is perhaps a little too upscale for a ferry service that allows passengers to camp in a tent on deck if they don’t feel like paying for a cabin. Still, it certainly lends a very distinctive air to the map! I also really like the smooth, organic curves that the routes take between ports: these always look better on water transportation maps than straight lines to me.

One minor complaint with the geography of the map is that the distance from Bellingham, WA to Ketchikan is a little too de-emphasized: it takes almost 40 hours to travel between these two ports via ferry. Also, the colours of the two routes that travel down to Bellingham – the Columbia and the Kennicott – are lacking a bit of contrast and can be a little hard to differentiate when they butt up to each other. The green that Daniel has chosen for the Kennicott is certainly bright, but it also creates some visual dissonance with the grey background, especially with the smaller type in the legend.

Speaking of colours, it’s interesting to note that the schedule grids on the AMHS website define colours for the ships, most of which are different to the colours that Daniel has chosen to use. In the example above, the Columbia would be a pinkish red, while the Kennicott would be purple: perhaps offering better contrast than Daniel’s solution? It would certainly be interesting to see a version with the official colours, just to tie the two sources of information together a little more.