Submitted by Nick, who says:
Hi Cameron. I live in Chicago and our commuter rail Metra is considering rebranding its lines and recently released two proposals. I thought you and your readers might enjoy reviewing them. The announcement, proposed designs, and link to a survey are here. The proposed designs are available in a PDF here [I’ve also reproduced these below – Cam].
I’ve been riding Metra for more than 20 years and I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the current line names have their faults but the proposed designs are “interesting” to say the least.
Transit Maps says:
The obtuse naming conventions of Metra’s commuter lines are like the names of lines on the London Underground – they have a certain old world charm about them, but they’re absolutely terrible for anyone but the most seasoned of commuters. Hey, let’s have some lines with “Milwaukee” in their name that don’t actually go there! To be honest, I thought that these line names would never be changed in a million years, so I’m kind of ecstatic that this discussion is even happening.
I do think it’s important that these rough little diagrams are almost certainly just tools to illustrate the status quo and the two new concepts, so I don’t think we need to get too hung up on the design right now – once the surveys have been done and some data compiled, then more complete (and better) maps will be generated.
That said, I think the concepts do have some problems.
The “cardinal direction” concept perhaps gets in its own way by having both directional prefixes and colour-coding by downtown terminus. This leads to all of the directions being denoted by multiple colours (two for north, two for west – both of which are the same two colours, yellow and green – and three for south). Maybe there could be two separate colours for the two “halves” of Union Station to prevent that station’s yellow routes from spreading out and dominating the map? The order the lines are named in also seems haphazard – the bullets for the northern lines count down when read from left to right, which goes against our natural reading order, while the southern lines don’t seem to have any natural order to their numbers – c’mon, the Millennium Station lines are just crying out to be S5, S6 and S7 at their outer termini from left to right, instead of S6, S5 and S7!
This problem carries across to the “M Numbers” diagram – there’s no discernable pattern to the numbering of the lines. A hub-and-spoke network like this should really be numbered in sequential order from the outer end of each line. Normally, this would start at the twelve o’clock position and go clockwise (we’re familiar with how a clock works, so this is can be a very intuitive design shorthand), but Lake Michigan forms a natural barrier to this system – you’d start at “M1” then have to jump halfway around the diagram to get to “M2”! Perhaps starting with “M1” to the west of the map would work better in this instance?
Our final word: These are very early concept diagrams with a lot of work still to done, but making things as easy as possible for commuters to understand has to be the end goal, and I’m not sure either of these are quite doing that right now. Still, it’s going to be interesting to see where this goes! If you use Metra, I definitely encourage you to go and do the survey.
Source: Metra website
I have to agree that the “cardinal direction” concept seems to be implementing two concepts at once for some reason. I think if they also aligned the naming with the downtown terminals (and distinguished between Union north and Union south) it would make the most sense, since lines from different terminals intersect each other, but lines from the same terminal much less. That way it’s obvious exactly where in downtown a line would take you if you’re in the suburb, and to where in downtown you need to get to catch a specific line, with the lines remaining consistent with each other at terminals.
Is there a reason you suggested starting with an M1 in the west? Given that positioning a clock on top of Chicago leaves you only with the 6-12 orientations (you can’t go into the lake), wouldn’t a clockwise concept starting at the south or a counterclockwise concept starting on the north make more sense? Otherwise you’d end up with a numbering continuity across the lake (unnecessary) and a discontinuity somewhere between two lines close to each other (odd).
Ha, just late night musings, really. I think counter-clockwise is pretty unintuitive, and starting the numbering at the 6 o’clock position could make the start position harder to find initially. The western stations are to the left of the map, so your eyes could pick that up first because of normal reading order. Then you’d follow the numbers clockwise and by the time you got to the lake, you’d understand the way things are working and move your eyes to the bottom, skipping the lake. Anyway, just a different idea to get people thinking about how and why you’d start with a sequential numbering order!
There *is* method to the Metra Madness. There are three regimes (for lack of a better term) of commuter trains under Metra.
Lines with “district” in the name are owned and operated by Metra, so Milwaukee North and West Districts, the Metra Electric district, and the Rock Island District. Historically, the Milwaukee Road and the Rock Island operated those lines pre-Metra.
Lines with “service” in the name are Metra-operated trains on another railroad’s track, so North Central Service, Southwest Service, and Heritage Corridor (whoops – no “service” there).
Lastly, the lines with active RR names, the BNSF line and the three UP lines (N, NW, W) – those are owned by *and* operated by the landlord railroads. I never understood who owns the cars because some actually had BNSF (and earlier BN, and before that Burlington) and UP logos on them.
More trivia? The UP lines, until the early part of this century still had Semaphore signals at the Chicago Passenger Terminal end. When the arm was vertical, the block was clear, when you were following another train, it would be at 45 deg, and if it was horizontal, you needed to stop. Those are, essentially, Green, Yellow, and Red. Guess what colors were/are on the schedule folders for those lines? UP-N – green, UP-NW – yellow, UP-W a very very pale red. One might call it pink, even. 🙂
NONE of this helps travelers in any way shape of form no matter how much it tickles my addled, railfan brain.
As someone else noted, I’d go with terminal-based names and colors. There are grand plans for new connections south of Chicago Union Station that may well change some lines’ terminals so that needs to be kept in mind, though given the current cabal in DC, they aren’t likely to happen any time soon (or ever if elections are “suspended”).
If it isn’t broke don’t fix it!
Both the “Cardinal” and “M For Metra” maps do have (mostly) consistent number schemes, they are just not obvious or useful to the rider.
On the “Cardinal” map, lines are numbered counter-clockwise based on within each zone (‘N’, ‘W’, ‘S’) based on the line not the terminus; in other words branches are numbered sequentially after the number of the mainline, but before the next line. So S4 comes after S2 geographically because S3 is a branch of S2; similarly S6 comes before S5 because S5 is the longer/parent line to S6/S7 branches. The inconsistencies are that the two ends of N4 are not given separate numbers, and for that matter N4 could be N2 per the logic as it shares route with N1. This provides no help to the rider; if one wanted to indicate branches/short the way would be to number some lines ‘MS2B’ and ‘S2C’ or ‘S20’ and ‘S21’ – this would give some indication that they run to some of the same stops as ‘S2’.
On the “M for Metra” map lines are numbered counter-clockwise based on suburban terminus but grouped based on the terminal they run to downtown. So M1/M2/M3 all go to Ogilvie. M4/M5/M6 all go to Union Station from the north, etc. Again, internally consistent but of no use.
I don’t think counterclockwise number would be a problem. If after finding “1” to the west you can grasp the pattern and understand why ‘6’ is at the very top but ‘7’ at the verybottom, then I would think that if you found “1′ at top dead center with ‘2’ and ‘3’ to the left of it you could pretty quickly grasp that numbering is counterclockwise.
The “M for Metra” really only makes sense if they also renumber all of the lines of the L to L1/L2/etc., like how Germany does for U-Bahn (subway: Line U1, U2,U3…) and S-Bahn (commuter rail: Line S1, S2,…). But they should not all be the same color, even on a transit map with the L. One idea I like was put forth for Washington DC, that the commuter rail lines (MARC, VTA) should be lighter version colors of the Metro lines they cross or extend. So the MARC Brunswick line would be the Pink Line because it crosses both branches of the Metro Red line. This gives the higher frequency Metro greater visual weight while associating the commuter lines as express versions of adjacent Metro service. In Chicago, the UP-N line would become the Lavender Line because it continues past the Purple Line; the UP-W line would be Lime or Emerald for paralleling the Green Line. In Chicago this is tougher than DC because of the larger number of lines and doubling back of the El in many cases, but its something to think about.
Overall I think the “Cardinal” map would be best, but with the schema reversed – all lines going to a certain area should have the same color, while each line should be named based on its downtown terminal. If I want to go to Highland Park, and I see lots of blue lines up there, but “You are Here” on the map is next to LaSalle St and red color lines, that’s an immediate sign I am not where I need to be. If I get to Ogilvie and I see a platform labelled with a green sign because trains going west board there, I’ll likely look for a different platform. I am influenced by a transit map I saw at the Britomart transit center in Aukland years ago. All bus lines to a given direction/district of the city had a different color on the map, and the signage at the associated bus stops were in the same color. You instantly grasped where to go on the transit mall to catch a bus you wanted, even if you needed more detailed wayfinding to pick the exact line and find the specific bus stop.
As for line naming, if you are at Blue Island and you are trying to get to Millennium Station, seeing a ‘M1’ train pull up versus and ‘L3’ train you might be able to figure out which you need without a map. This could be even easier with two letter line prefixes (‘OG’ Ogilvie, ‘US’ Union Station, etc.). Of course in far too many places (New Lenox, Western, Des Plaines, Mayfair) Metra lines cross without stations offering the ability to make connections using this scheme….
All trains north of Madison numbered clockwise west to north
All trains south of Madison numbered anti-clockwise west to south.
All trains are ID’d by their inbound terminal.
Thus, O-1 is the old UP-W, O-2 is the old UP-NW, O-3 is the old UP-N.
NU-1 (Union Station North Concourse) is the old MD-W. NU-2 is the old NC Service, and NU-3 is the old MD-N.
SU-1 (south concourse) is the old BNSF, SU-2 is the old HC, and SU-3 is the SW service
The Rock Island is at least L-1, and L-2 if you want to distinguish the expresses. When the SW service is diverted to LaSalle, it can be L-3 and SU-3 can be dropped.
Electrics are M-1,2,3 whichever way you want to do it.
Submitted for your consideration, as Rod Serling would have said…
seems to be missing the opposing two options: color by station using M1-M# (my preference) and remove color but keep cardinal names. so the survey is a bit disingenuous as stripping any and all context from the label clearly cannot help you understand the region. as pointed out, the color could be used as a stand in for cardinal direction, and the M could be something more useful.