Submitted by Nick, who says:

Thanks again so much for your feedback and review of my Connecticut map (April 2015). I’ve been working on a few new maps, and I’ve finally gotten one in a place where I’d love to have your feedback. I don’t know if you’ve seen the West Wing, but there’s an episode where some characters have a meeting with the made-up Cartographers for Social Equality. The thrust of their argument is that maps change the way we see the world, and that’s undeniably true.

With that as inspiration, I’ve been trying to think – short of investing literal billions of dollars to fix the system, what could we do to fix DC’s transit systems? The cheapest result I came up with is this map. Would a map fix anything? Obviously not. But some of the biggest issues we have in this city are that too many residents work under the assumption that Metro is the be all, end all. Our streetcar has been developed poorly, but it’s been frustrating hearing people say we don’t need the streetcar because we have the Metro (even though it right now serves neighborhoods completely unserved by Metro). The sad part is that Metro is incredibly successful…as a commuter rail system. It’s great at getting people in and out of the district! Would district residents maybe be more willing to invest in better intracity transit if we stopped pretending that Metro should be an effective way to get around the city? Maybe!

Getting Metro to mesh well with VRE and MARC systems was simultaneously easier and more complex than I was expecting. It’s obviously hard to find a good color scheme for 11 lines is not what I would call easy. And then there was the question of scale. I think this schematic for metro is more geographically accurate than the existing metro map, but I found myself extending lines just as often as I was truncating them. This was intensely frustrating, but I tried to remind myself that this needed to be effective as a schematic, demonstrating relative distances even if they lacked precision.

I’d love to have your feedback, both on the execution and the theory behind the concept.

Transit Maps says:

This is an undeniably simple idea – treating Metro, VRE and MARC as one integrated commuter rail system serving the Greater DC area – even if regional politics would almost certainly preclude it from ever actually happening. (As well as the whole issue of timetabling, with Metro running frequent service all day, and MARC and VRE really only running rush hour commuter services… let’s just assume that in Nick’s fantasy world, all those pesky details are ironed out when the three agencies merge.)

I do agree that Metro can seem more akin to commuter rail than urban rapid transit: it brings people from the suburbs to and from the central employment areas perhaps more effectively than moving them from place to place within the District – compare the web-like structure of Paris’ Métro to the hub-and-spoke nature of DC’s namesake and you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about. So, Nick’s map – though implausible – does offer an interesting alternative perspective on transit in the Greater DC area.

The map itself is quite nicely drawn, with some obvious Vignellian influence. The newly-minted names for each route give good local flavour, but do present a bit of a problem for colour-blind users, as they’re the only way to identify which line is which. Unfortunately, some of the line colours (especially Manassas, Montgomery and Prince George’s) can look very similar for these readers. The official Metro map’s lettered bullets (”BL, “RL”, etc.) at the end of each line help alleviate this problem; maybe Nick could consider something similar.

The large area that the map covers – and the hub-and-spoke nature of the network that I mentioned previously – means that there’s a lot of empty space around the edge of the map. Although Nick is keen to emphasise the relative distances covered by the system, I do think he could tighten the map up a bit and also make the labels for the stations just a bit bigger. Everything just feels a little distant and small at the moment.

Minor tweaks: the Green/Prince George’s line should cross over the pink/brown lines, as it’s getting lost underneath them at present, especially with the change in direction being hidden. I’d also nudge the angled Blue/Arlington corner down next to Courthouse until it lines up with the 90-degree corner of the Silver/Dulles line, just to be a little neater. One typo: it should be Arlington Cemetery, not Cemetary.

I’m not sure how I feel about all the county boundaries: it just seems so parochial, as well as cluttering up the map with a whole heap of dashed lines, especially when it gets to outlying counties that don’t even have rail service. Then again, it does help with rapid orientation for users. Finally, I’m always sad when the “District diamond” doesn’t make a perfectly symmetrical shape: Nick’s left side is just a little lower than his right.

Our rating: An interesting – and perhaps a little sardonic – reimagining of rail transit in the Greater DC area. I like the thought put into the concept, and the map’s not bad either. Some tweaking could perhaps tighten the layout up some more and really make it sing. 3 stars.

Source: Nick’s project page – including some more detailed images