Submitted by Calley, who says:

This was found via the /r/BayArea subreddit. It appears to be an authentic transit map from September 1981 still hanging in the 12th Street Oakland City Center BART station! It’s published by an entity I’ve never heard of called the “Regional Transit Association.” On your blog I’ve previously seen a very clumsy and messy map that attempted to show the myriad transit systems of the Bay, including rail and connecting buses. This is a cleaner, very diagrammatical map that limits itself to rail and some of the major buses that are either very frequent or provide a key connection to areas not served by BART. The wide lines remind me of the Washington Metrorail map as well. The Bay Area would be served well by a modernized version of the map as there is none today that cleanly shows a comprehensive transit network. Would love to get your thoughts.

Transit Maps says:

This “fat line” style of transit diagram was very much in vogue in the late 1970s/early 1980s, so it’s really no surprise to find some similarities between this map and the (slightly earlier) Washington Metro map. For me at least, there’s also a little bit of the original Boston MBTA spider map here, especially in the way that the branches of the Muni streetcar lines are treated – looking a lot like the simplified branches of the Green Line in Boston.

Handel Gothic, the typeface used for the map’s title (and groovy logo) is a little at odds with the more restrained “minimalist” Helvetica employed elsewhere, but it was a popular display typeface at the time, often used to invoke a “futuristic” feeling. Note especially the ligature made out of the “NN” in “CONNECTIONS” – now there’s some great early 80s typography!

The map itself is an interesting historical record, showing BART’s extent in 1981 (only built to Daly City down the peninsula, for example) and the “Caltrans Peninsula Train”, which is Caltrain in everything but name. Many of these regional connections are very similar to what still exists today, which is interesting to see.

Designwise, it’s a bit uneven – it has some nicely simplified route lines and clear labelling, but the coastline of the Bay is way too fussy and detailed, especially the north-eastern part. The way the green Santa Clara County Transit line gets pushed out of alignment by the SamTrans line at Menlo Park is pretty sloppy. The inset for downtown San Francisco doesn’t really do that good of a job at clarifying things: one feels that all the empty space in the Pacific Ocean could have been better used to enlarge the inset and make it more useful.

The last word: A great historical document, although the design work is a little less polished than it could have been. It definitely seems to be emulating other transit maps of the period, though with perhaps slightly less effect. Still a pretty solid three stars.