Submitted by Sam, who says:

After finishing this map early last year I think it’s finally time to submit it!
Dunedin, NZ had the second cable car system in the world (after San Francisco), as well as an extensive network of trams, with some ferries and rail as well. This is a map of the greatest extent of that old network, including historical closing dates and old line numbers. None of this infrastructure is around now (pretty much all cable cars, tramways and metro rail got canned in NZ from 1950-2000), but it’s still a fantastic piece of history for our small city.

Transit Maps says:

Sam sent a very early version of this map to me (quite) a while ago, then asked me to hold off on publishing it while he reworked it. Fast forward to now and we have this lovely map in a modern style that revisits the halcyon days of rail-based transit in Dunedin.

I particularly like how the greenbelt of parks forms a logical boundary between the detailed street grid of the city and the more stylised surrounding suburbs. Wisely, Sam has labelled all the streets that the cable cars and trams ran along, so this approach works well. His colour palette is bright and pleasing, though interestingly, the cable cars tend to get darker, duller colours (which is one way of quickly identifying them, I guess!).

I’m not thrilled by the transparent fill underneath the legend that the coastline and rail and ferry lines can be seen through. The lines interfere too much with the legibility of the type and don’t add that much to the meaning of the map. The lines could simply end at the edge of the map proper, with labelled arrows pointing in the direction of the final destinations. The cheeky way that the Andersons Bay line inserts itself between different sections of the legend is quite fun, though.

Finally, while Sam notes the ending date of each of the services (“Until 8/1947”, etc.), he doesn’t tell us when each service started. As I doubt they all sprang into existence on the same date, this information would be really interesting to show.

Source: Sam’s website