Submitted by Dan, who says:

Hi! Just saw that you posted Edmonton’s long-term LRT network plan.

That’s the engineering consultants’ version; I designed a nicer map on commission for the mayor’s office — with significantly more detail, based on the individual line plans — which you can see here. The city’s transportation site still uses the consultants’ version, but their advocacy site uses my redesign. (For some reason, though, they decided to crop the full map on that site, which is why I posted the full PDF separately.)

Alternatively, if you want to see the more detailed version of the consultants’ map, it’s on page 4 of this PDF (with the simplistic version you already posted on page 1):

It’s odd, and certainly confusing, that the city offers so many versions of the same thing, but my understanding is that the nice version is used primarily for in-person advocacy between the mayor and other orders of government. That strategy has been pretty effective; Mayor Iveson was elected in Oct 2013, and by March 2014, the federal government and the province both committed to fund the SE line.

(I meant to send the new map to you when we unveiled it last year, but there’s one small design change I’ve been experimenting with and haven’t had time to finish. Oh well!)

Transit Maps says:

Well, Dan’s map is certainly an improvement over the map I featured yesterday! It’s bright, colourful and easy to understand – great for the advocacy role it performs. 

I personally find the convoluted path the North Saskatchewan River takes across the map a bit visually distracting (even though it is a pretty good representation of the river’s actual meandering path) and would have simplified or rounded/smoothed it out a bit, just to make it a bit softer. 

The placement of the Jasper Place and Meadowlark stations within their respective 90-degree angle changes is a little unattractive – they could just be nudged up/down a tiny amount to sit in the vertical sections of their routes, I think.

Overall, however, I think this is an attractive and successful future network map: clean and clear, but not overly detailed. Nice work, Dan!