This post comes about because of an email from an anonymous follower, who says:

“Any idea if a unified San Francisco transit map exists somewhere out there, perhaps a la the Portland one? SF has to have one of the more confusing transit systems in the country, what with Caltrain + BART + Muni + cable cars + the F line.”

As it happens, there are plenty of unofficial maps showing both just the City of San Francisco and the greater Bay Area.

This one, from calurbanist.com, is definitely one of the best. It shows BART, Muni Metro, the F line, Caltrain, and more. The only rail transit it doesn’t show are the historic cable cars (which surely don’t qualify as rapid transit, anyway) and interstate Amtrak trains, preferring to focus on the Amtrak California Capitol Corridor and San Joaquin services.

Extra handy features include an indication of stations with timed transfers between services and an awesome little diagram of how BART services change quite radically depending on the day of the week.

Technically, the map is extremely well drawn – there’s a lovely clean minimalism to the linework and the colour palette is gorgeous, especially in the background areas.

My one minor complaint is that the colours used to denote Muni Metro and Caltrain are very similar to each other. While the relative thicknesses of their service lines help distinguish them from each other, the services do touch and overlap in a couple of places. This problem seems like it could have been easily solved with a little more thought, but still barely detracts from the sheer quality of this piece.

Our rating: One of my favourite unofficial maps. Four-and-a-half stars.

Source: Calurbanist (newer version of this map)