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”).