Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Transit Maps has never taken a look at the map for Portland’s northern neighbour, the (original) Vancouver. With the recent addition of their second “The Vine” BRT route along Mill Plain Boulevard, now seems like a good time.
At first glance, it seems to be a pretty solid map with some nicely simplified geography and routes clearly delineated. To my eyes, it seems to take some design cues from Spokane’s celebrated bus map (especially the dotted route lines for express services), though it’s certainly not as polished. However, closer inspection reveals a map that just seems really unfinished.
The first major problem? There’s no legend. There’s nothing on this map (or on the C-TRAN website) to quickly and easily explain what all the different lines and colours actually represent. The bold red and green “The Vine” lines are obvious enough, and you can intuit that the mid-blue lines are regular local bus services, but then why is Route 2 a slightly lighter colour? What does a thick dark blue route mean? Why is Route 105 a solid yellow line, when the 105X is a dotted yellow line? And then there’s the large green areas, which are meant to indicate C-TRAN’s “The Current” rideshare zones, but end up looking for all the world like parkland without a legend to tell you definitively otherwise.
Some digging around on C-TRAN’s website eventually gives the answer to some of these questions, but also raises more along the way. It looks like Route 2 is a lighter shade of blue because it only runs on weekdays? A thick dark blue line should indicate a “Regional” route, which for C-TRAN means that it provides connecting service into Portland but isn’t a downtown express route (these are the yellow lines). These routes all have “Regional” in their name with a “6x” route number, and require a higher fare than a local bus within Vancouver. This causes inconsistencies, however, as Route 71 is shown as a Regional bus when it runs entirely within Vancouver, and the “67 – Airport Regional” is incorrectly shown as a limited-stop local service (a light blue dotted line, which should be reserved for routes with a “4x” number). The only difference between the 105 and 105X that I can see is that the 105 stops in downtown Vancouver on its way to/from downtown Portland, which somehow makes it “local” enough to earn a solid route line? Strange.
Some other unfinished or inconsistent elements: there’s some explanatory text on top of the downtown area that looks like there should have been a white box behind it. Some similar routes merge into each other (see the 105X and the 190), while others run concurrent to each other. The way that the routes south of Fisher’s Landing get cut off by the edge of the canvas as they turn onto SR 14 is careless. All the routes that go off the map should have an indication of their final destination.
Our final word: The bones of something good, but just seems really unfinished. It’s almost as if some layers were turned off accidentally before the file was exported, because it’s hard to rationalise the complete absence of a legend for the map otherwise.
UPDATE 10/27/2023: The design team from C-TRAN reached out to me via a Twitter message to let me know that the map has been updated. The new version addresses just about every one of my concerns, and is a great improvement. The source link below should take you to the new map now.
Source: C-TRAN website