Submitted by Tony, who says:

Hi, I created this map because I always wished someone would. I am not a designer, I am an IT Manager. Please let me know what you think!

Transit Maps says:

For an IT manager, this is a pretty accomplished effort, Tony! (And it just goes to show how little we should define ourselves by one label – everyone is capable of excelling at so many different things.)

Really, this little map does just about everything that you could reasonably expect it to – it names the trails, gives their distances and joining points with the other trails and roads, an idea of elevation, and even TheBus route numbers to some of the trailheads. That’s pretty information-dense in anyone’s language!

There’s also good differentiation between the brightly coloured trails and the light grey roads, though I think that there’s a white border at the intersection of Nehoa and Punahao that shouldn’t be there – it almost makes it look like the roads don’t actually intersect with each other.

I also really appreciate the addition of popular routes created by stringing together multiple trails into longer in-and-outs or loops, though it does highlight the one weakness of the map: the seemingly random placement of the lettered trail intersections on the map. As the popular routes rely on the reader stringing together a bunch of letters, they need to be easy to find on the map, or else things become too hard to follow. The simplest solution is to reorder the intersection letters to follow normal reading logic: reading from left to right and then down the page. So Tony’s current “V” would become “A”, then Q/B, O/C, T/D, U/E, and so on. Note that in systems like this, the letters “I” and “O” are often omitted as they can be confused with the numerals “1″ and “0″ – though in this case, that could cause problems as there are 26 lettered intersections plus the two “two-letter” arboretum trailheads.

Our rating: A pleasant and comprehensive little guide to some wonderful trails. Just needs a little bit of work to make some of the information easier to find. Three stars!