Submitted by Ze, who says:
As a little mapping exercise I made a fantasy-ish strip map today of what tiered service patterns on the GO Transit Lakeshore Line could hypothetically look like after the Regional Express Rail (RER) project is finished. Some of it is fairly reasonable/already proposed/under construction, such as the East Harbour or Park Lawn stations, Eglinton Crosstown, Ontario Line, etc.; while some parts of the map are a little more far in the future or are unproposed thus far, such as a GO service to Brantford, Cobourg, Uxbridge, etc.
I based the map design on West Japan Railway Company’s strip maps as I wanted to kind of demonstrate a parallel as to how Torontonians/people from the GTA can reimagine the GO Transit system; not just as a simple commuter rail system, but a more complex rapid transit or regional system with different service patterns, like in Japan. Unlike Japan, however, I also included some “limited express” services that I’d imagine GO could hypothetically operate as well, adopting the “limited express” model that Japan Railways employs for longer-distance rail.
Transit Maps says:
A rather lovely hypothetical diagram here, and one that definitely wears its influences proudly on its sleeve – the JR West lineage is immediately obvious, right down to the “some trains do not stop at this station” central black dot symbol and leader lines joining stations to connecting services information.
If there’s one thing I’d like to see as an improvement, it’d be a consistently-applied horizontal grid. At the moment, most of the routes on the opposite sides of Union Station don’t quite line up horizontally and it creates a bit of visual imbalance – something is “off”, even if the viewer doesn’t quite know what is causing it. I’ve demonstrated how using a grid and aligning horizontal elements to it across the entire width of the diagram could work below. Note how aligning routes to the grid allows the ST and LE branches to mirror each other exactly on their unified horizontal axis instead of the curve on the ST branch finishing further to the right as it does on Ze’s version.
Of course, the grid could then be used as a way to place the connecting services information consistently as well, and so on… forming an underlying basis for the whole diagram.
Our final word: An excellent application of a proven strip map design that I feel could be made even better by adherence to an underlying grid to give a little bit more structure to the diagram.