In a move I’d like to see more often from transit agencies, San Francisco’s BART has a fully-editable “non-official” version of their system map available for download from their site. It has a Creative Commons license, meaning that you simply have to attribute the original map to BART and it’s free to use, commercially or otherwise.

Mainly designed for app and third-party website developers who need a BART map, it’s also great for those learning to create transit maps. You can simply open it up in Adobe Illustrator and edit to your heart’s content. While the file is saved in the Illustrator-native .ai format, and not the open-standard .svg format, it should be openable in the open-source vector-editing application, Inkscape.

The map itself is reminiscent of the official map with its distinctive “hexagonal” form, but is different enough to stand alone, which is exactly what BART intends. They really don’t want their official, copyrighted map used by third party applications and websites (which might imply BART endorsement where there is none), so they offer this alternative instead.

Personally, I’m not crazy about the green type used for transfer stations, and I wish the background coastline was editable vector artwork instead of a background raster image file. But hey — if you don’t like it, now you can edit it yourself and make it better!

Source: BART website via Kurt Raschke