America’s latest modern streetcar line opens today (May 6th, 2016) in Kansas City, Missouri, running approximately two miles north from Union Station to the River Market district. To go with the new system, there’s also this spiffy new map, which will be mounted at stops along the route, as seen in this great photo taken by Edward Russell.

Overall, I like it a lot: it’s clean and simple with just enough detail for users to orient themselves and has some nice icons for connecting services as well. I think that there’s a few too many directional arrows – you could probably halve the number and still get the idea across – and the slightly offset stops (meant to indicate that the stations are placed on either side of the named cross street?) are perhaps a little overly detailed for such a simple map.

The main point of interest for me is the typeface used – Halis Rounded Medium, by the look of it. It’s certainly modern and friendly, if slightly idiosyncratic. Its capital “M” looks uncannily like a “W” rotated 180 degrees, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. However, the kerning between some letter pairs is pretty awful – too tight in some places, yet very loose in others. Taking the word “Metro” as an example, there’s a huge amount of space between the “M” and “e”, and the “r” and “o”, but the “etr” in the middle is set very close. A little manual kerning here and there could have helped this look a lot better.

Our rating: Overall, this is very nice, and should be seen as a template for future  American streetcar maps. Let down slightly by some unfortunate typographical oversights. Three stars.

Source: RideKC Streetcar website