Hello! I just thought I’d send you my attempt at making the NYC Ferry network a bit less intimidating to navigate. While many of the issues are with the network itself (the stopping patterns are absolutely bizarre), I’ve always thought the official map made the network far harder to navigate than it should be. So here’s my attempt to fix that!
Transit Maps says:
Like Evelyn, I’ve never really been a fan of the official NYC Ferries map: it’s sloppily drawn and can’t decide if it’s a Vignelli-style diagram or a geographic map. Eventually it fails at being either, with too much room being taken up just to show the trip all the way out to Rockaway that could be better used to expand the complex East River routings and some absurdly overly-detailed coastline in Jamaica Bay.
Evelyn’s solution is distinctly diagrammatic and just looks so much better. The bold line colors cased in black really pop out of the sombre blue and grey background and are easier to follow as result. Some slight tweaking of the official colours has been made, especially to the Soundview route, which is much lighter than the official dark purple. Perhaps this makes the Rockaway and Soundview colours a bit too similar, but some tinkering could fix that pretty easily.
Labelling is generally good, though perhaps I would have stacked the Pier 11/Wall St label just to keep it well away from the St. George route line. The Brookfield Place Terminal and Corlears Hook labels are the only other area of worry: it might be possible to slide Brookfield Place a little further to the left to get a bit more empty space between the two labels.
Of particular note is that even though this is a schematic diagram, Evelyn has implied the long haul out to Rockaway without having to take up huge amounts of empty space in doing so – great work!
One thing I personally don’t like on ferry maps is too many sharp curves – ferries don’t make tight 90-degree turns out on the water, but big, lazy arcs. So the section from Astoria to Roosevelt Island to Long Island City – a whole bunch of stacked 90-degree angles – bothers me on both versions of the map. I feel there has to be a solution that looks more naturalistic: maybe the route uses curves similar to those at the Brooklyn Navy Yard stop at Roosevelt Island, just to break up the rigidness of that part of the route?
Other things I’d like to see: some sort of dash on the Governors Island (note that there’s no apostrophe in the name!) route line to immediately indicate its seasonal nature. The Staten Island Ferry – no, it’s not a NYC Ferry route, but it absolutely should be shown as an alternative for the travelling public. Finally, I believe that a route from Pier 11 to Coney Island will be launching before the end of the year, so it’s be great to see a version that incorporates that.
Our final word: Compact, bright, and more than a little bit fun. Really, really nice work!
I have created a map of the Amsterdam tram network as it was in 1930. In this year, the network reached its greatest extent in terms of number of lines: 25.
It was rather easy to find out the trajectory of each line, as there are plenty of digitised resources available online. I used another map I created last year of the current tram network as a base, and made the appropriate changes from there. I mainly wanted to show the underlying structure of the network in 1930 (which is strikingly similar to today’s) and the trajectory of each individual line.
Initially, I didn’t plan on including individual stops, primarily because I couldn’t find a good source for it. Someone else pointed me to a digitised copy of a booklet from 1930, including all stops for each line, available online via the website of the ‘Stadsarchief Amsterdam’ (Amsterdam city archives). That allowed me to figure out where the stops would have been back then, though I didn’t label them, as that would have distracted from the original purpose of this map.
The map legend shows all lines with their route signs as they were in shown on the front and back end of each car, including the original line colours. These line colours are still displayed on today’s (digital) tram displays, though they have lost their original meaning a long time ago.
If you want to read more about the design process, please visit my blog. It’s in Dutch, but I’m confident Google Translate will do a pretty decent job translating it to English [I can confirm that this is the case – Cam].
Transit Maps says:
Now, this is a project that I heartily endorse, having now done many similar maps myself. And this one’s a beauty that really highlights just how similar the network in 1930 is to that of the modern day: there may be less routes now, but they still traverse much the same routes as then.
What really makes this piece work for me is the attention to detail. The diagram uses multiples of 30 degrees to draw its route lines—immediately evocative of a hexagon—so Alain uses the hexagon as a motif throughout the map. Numbered route bullets, station dots and even the decorative border framing the diagram all get the treatment, yet it never looks overdone and the whole design remains nicely understated. Particularly nice is how the symbol for one-way stops are a “slice” made by overlapping two hexagons and removing the part where they both overlap. Both the rather lovely typeface and the old-time spelling of place names give the diagram some lovely verisimilitude as well – these really sell it as a period piece.
I also welcome the inclusion of the distinctive coloured patterns used on each route’s headboard in the legend, as these are such a distinctive feature of old tram lines (Sydney also used a very similar system). Some say that these headboards were designed to assist illiterate riders, but I always feel that they just made each tram more easily-identifiable at a distance.
Alain’s handling of the insane terminus at Amsterdam Centraal is pretty awesome, with all the lines that go around what must have been a very crowded loop collapsing down to one line with the cross-town lines “bumping” around them. Line 22, which looks like it just made clockwise laps around Amsterdam Centraal (to the ferry terminal on the IJ?) is a very curious thing indeed! I’d perhaps like to see this level of detail extended to all the turnaround loops and one way sections that the system used, as I find that type of thing fascinating, but I can also see why Alain opted not to.
Our final rating: A gorgeous historical map that I could look at for hours. Great work, Alain!
Sea-Tac has three inter-terminal people mover systems. They’ve introduced a new system map with color routing designations.
Transit Maps says:
Boy, this diagram makes really hard work out of something fairly simple. The colour-coding is fine if it helps people find the right train to get to their terminal, though I personally never had a problem with understanding that the North train loop took me to the North satellite terminal.
However, the diagram itself is unnecessarily vague about just about everything that could be useful to know, like: where are the stairs/escalators/elevators that move you between levels to get to the train platforms? And where exactly are the A and D gate train platforms located? They seem to float in some sort of limbo that’s not actually physically connected to the terminal on the diagram, which is just insane. In reality, they sit underneath the departures level about at about the point where the top layer narrows down, which might just be a handy detail to know if I’m using this diagram to find out how to get there.
All this ridiculousness seems to be in aid of keeping the two satellite loop lines (Blue and Green now, I guess) as visually simple as possible, but is it worth it if the rest of the diagram is such hard work? The drop shadow effect between the two levels of the airport is very pretty, but do we need it at all? It just seems to add detail and visual clutter where none is needed.
Our final word: A convoluted mess that’s probably going to stress airport travelers out more than they already are. Good luck using this to transfer between terminals in a hurry!
The construction of the new terminal at Salt Lake City International Airport necessitated constructing a new light rail station, which opened today. One interesting new thing for UTA at the station is a line map. While these have existed on board UTA’s TRAX light rail and FrontRunner commuter rail trains for a while, this is the first time they have used this kind of map at a station. I do feel that this kind of map is useful in this context. However, I feel the map is lacking somewhat. First off, it might not be obvious to riders new to the system that the icons represent transfer points to other UTA rail services, so a legend might be helpful. Another big complaint is that UTA continues to leave off any information about bus services, which would be helpful in encouraging riders to use connecting buses. On the other hand, the one really helpful thing that this line map does include is mentioning that the Green Line does go downtown, which is probably the most sought after piece of information for people arriving at the airport and looking to ride the train downtown.
Transit Maps says:
Thanks for the photo, Mike! It’s good to see that UTA is moving in the right direction when it comes to passenger information – particularly at the airport, which may be people’s first introduction to the city’s light rail system.
This strip map does the job, but still somehow feels a bit loose and incomplete compared to the best examples from around the world – Berlin’s being a prime example. Part of it is the typeface, which I believe is Hoefler&Co.’s Whitney. While it’s a fine typeface that is designed to be used for wayfinding purposes, I find its use here a bit flat and underwhelming. At first glance, it comes across looking more like Microsoft’s Calibri, which is almost never the desired result. Some quick fixes: move all the labels to the left a bit (to match the gap to the icons on the left of the route line), track all the letters out a bit for readability and increase the font size as much as possible.
I think the icons to the left of the line are generally fine and easily understood. It’s explained at the top of the map that this light rail line is the “Green Line”, so I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to assume that the “Blue Line” and “Red Line” – which also share a similar icon – are also light rail. The “S-Line” and “FrontRunner” are a bit more problematic as they’re not explained quite as conveniently. Adding “Commuter Rail” underneath the FrontRunner label solves that problem – maybe it needs to also be “S-Line Streetcar”? I’d try to avoid adding a legend to a simple strip map like this as it just increases the amount of information that needs to be parsed by a reader.
Our final word: Has all the elements of a fine strip map, but somehow manages to be less than the sum of its parts. It’s still perfectly usable, but not quite as good as it could be.
The third in my series of maps depicting electric streetcar networks of the Pacific Northwest, one that both builds on my previous maps of Spokane and Portland and adds something new to the mix: geography.
At first sight, the Yakima streetcar and interurban network may not look quite as impressive as the other two larger cities (which had dozens of lines each) but there’s one very special aspect that truly sets it apart: it’s still operating.
Opened on Christmas Day 1907, passenger service continued until February 1947 – long after other streetcars had faded away in Washington state – and freight service on the electric interurban lines continued right up to 1985, when the Union Pacific finally abandoned the by-then unprofitable system. However, a small touristic trolley service using the interurban lines had begun in 1974 and has continued up to the present day. If you’re ever in Yakima, be sure to visit the Yakima Valley Trolleys Museum – housed in the original 1910 car barn and power house – and maybe take a ride on one of their historical trolleys along Pine Street or even up to Selah.
For once, researching the lines of the network wasn’t a problem, thanks to Kenneth G. Johnsen’s excellent book Apple Country Interurban, and a whole slew of original engineering blueprints found on the YVT museum’s website. As seen below, the amount of detail on these is incredibly comprehensive and allowed a lot of extra detail to be included on the final map, often even including what kind of facilities were to be found at each stop – ranging from a full depot building down to a simple pole indicating that trains could stop there. City maps from 1918 and Sanborn maps from 1920 provided further supporting details. The only line which still lacks a bit of detail is the interurban line out to Henrybro, for which I haven’t come across a proper map yet.
Instead, the main challenge presented by this map was one of scale: the interurban lines headed far out into the surrounding countryside, making the city lines (the main focus of the previous maps in the series) shrink down into one corner of the map. Almost immediately, I decided that I would use an inset diagram to demonstrate how the city lines worked, while the main map would show the interurban lines in full over a simple one-colour indication of the extent of the city lines. While this worked well, early drafts of the map looked very empty and flat, simply because there was nothing to see in large parts of it!
I got to thinking that I’d like to include an indication of geography in the map, not only to provide some much-needed texture to the flat map, but also to indicate how the railroads were governed by it. The line north from Yakima to Selah had to pass through the narrow Selah Gap, which already had the main Northern Pacific line passing through it. The interurban line follows almost the same path as the NP line, but necessarily higher up the valley wall, making for a spectacular journey through the gap. Similarly, the Cowiche Canyon branch of the North Yakima & Valley Railway has to traverse the eponymous canyon on its way out to Tieton.
A request for assistance in making a suitable hillshade for the map was met by Daniel Huffman, whose willingness to share his knowledge and help others always astounds me. With his hillshade now acting as a canvas for the map, I pretty much redrew all the lines to ensure everything lined up properly (I’d been a little too diagrammatic in that earlier draft!). Quite remarkably, there are a couple of places on the hillshade where the old interurban right-of-way could still be discerned: normally when the line dropped off the edge of a steep hill or similar. As a result of all this work, this is probably as close to an actual geographical map as you’ll ever see from me, though it’s important to note that I’ve still simplified a lot of things and this is definitely not a fully-accurate trackage map (although I could almost make one with all the data I’ve gathered!)
Note that the path of the rivers on the main map are based off city maps of Yakima from 1918, and often show a substantially different path to today’s rivers (seen on the small “Current Trolley Lines” map at the bottom right). The most obvious difference is the presence of the two huge log ponds that were part of the Cascade Lumber Mill on the edge of town – served by the YVT’s North Eighth Street line.
Once the main map was drawn, I adapted the city line diagram from it – separating the eight routes of the time out into their own lines, and indicating some of the common ways that the routes interlined as they passed through downtown by using similar colours for the respective east- and west-side lines. These common interlinings are all taken from the map on the inside cover of Apple Country Interurban, though there’s plenty of photographic evidence within that same book that other interlinings were sometimes used – with interurban cars sometimes even extending their run to the far end of a city line on the east side of town. The YVT only had a small fleet of cars without a lot of redundancy, and I feel that they often just went where they were needed at the time. Headways were never spectacular: most city lines only ran twice an hour, and some just once an hour. Six trains a day went out to Wiley City and Henrybro, while eight a day ran on the Selah Line – four only went as far north as Taylor, while the other four continued all the way to the end of the line at Speyers.
One oddity of the network is the Orchard Line: it’s never included as a city line, nor does it ever appear on interurban timetables. Despite the YVT’s franchise requiring it to carry passengers on all its lines, it seems that this line was treated as more of a freight spur (collecting produce from the farms in the area) than an actual “line”, so it existed in a slightly grey area.
Because there aren’t many lines that needed to be listed in the map’s legend, I’ve included some extra historical information about each of them (opening and closing dates, etc.), as well as a small map of the current trolley operations on Pine Street and out to Selah. Of the 48 miles that operated in 1920, only about five remain in use today.
As always, comments are welcome below! Prints of the map are available for purchase in the Transit Mapsprint store.
I’ve always thought that San Diego’s “Trolley” map to be pretty bad, with various clashing angles, line icons and brand names (ugh) that don’t add anything (“Sycuan” is a casino, and the Blue LIne is named UC San Diego because they’re a sponsor, not because the line extension will go there). Only ONE landmark is noted, the baseball park downtown. The only geographical feature indicated is the international border, which isn’t necessarily bad, but if they’re going to note the border, they could also indicate that from San Ysidro station it’s a short walk to Mexico. On the other hand, two stations have airport indicators, yet the airport is far from both of them, and there’s no airport shuttle as such. All in all, it’s just a mess of a map.
Anyway, I was hoping that the MTS would take the opportunity to rethink the map when they open the major extension of the Blue Line north to UC San Diego and “UTC”, which is a major center of offices and housing. I just ran across a new map on the MTS website [and] I’d love to hear your comments! To me, it’s moderately better than the old one, but not great, and I think a design professional (which I’m not) could improve it immensely. It really bugs me that the Orange Line takes a short right angle while all other turns are presented as curves… I also think the broad Orange Line curve at City College is distracting, but maybe that’s unavoidable? What bothers me most is the Orange Line angle in Lemon Grove that does not reflect the angle of the “Euclid Avenue” label that’s next to it. Ouch!
Transit Maps says:
This one’s an interesting beast, Robert – there’s some things I like more than in the old version (left), and some that I don’t. It probably comes out as being better in the long run, but only just. Overall, it’s certainly cleaner and easier to read, with the angled labels being slightly less neck-breaking. The placement of Courthouse station is much better now, without the overwrought way it was brought inside the Silver Line loop previously. An understated but very welcome change is the way that the line name icons have all lost their black outlines (which made them look a bit childish) and now have their names set in the same colour instead of black. It unifies the information and links the names directly to the route lines themselves – so much better!
However, I do miss the unique angles of the previous map, which were very distinctive and perhaps even a little more representative of the actual trajectories of the lines in real life (not always important in a diagram, but still nice to have if possible!). It’s especially noticeable with the downtown loop, which had a very distinctive curved section in its southwestern quadrant, but is now just a regular ol’ rectangle.
Speaking of the loop, the Silver Line – a heritage trolley, not full light rail – is still a bit problematic. It only runs in a clockwise loop because the PCC streetcars on the line are only single-ended, and it only runs on weekends – neither of which are indicated on the map. It also doesn’t get any station dots, which perhaps indicates that it was included somewhat grudgingly on the diagram. A directional arrow or two might fix the first problem; and a more comprehensive map legend the second.
The sharp right-angle turn that the Orange Line takes at 12th & Imperial is perhaps a little unfortunate, but seemingly unavoidable if the Green and Orange lines are to create a unified horizontal line across the diagram. There are potential solutions like staggering the station dots at 12th & Imperial, but something like that might come across as over-designed on a simple diagram like this one.
Interestingly, because the rest of the diagram has become strictly rectilinear, the one remaining angled section along the Orange Line looks a bit out of place – I might have just straightened it out to simply form a standard 90-degree angle. The error that Robert points out above – that the angled station labels don’t match the angle of this section of line is impossible to unsee once you’ve noticed it, unfortunately.
Finally, I quite like the hatched treatment of the future extension of the Blue Line – it’s got a very “Washington, DC Metro Map” feel to it, which I think the designers were definitely trying to evoke.
Our final word: Better, but at the cost of an unique and distinctive map design.
In anticipation of this month’s service extension to Northgate [Opening day is October 2! – Cam], Sound Transit is rolling out new maps on the Link rail system. Now tagged as the “1 Line” (Green) in anticipation of the future East Link extension.
Transit Maps says:
I think this our first look at Sound Transit’s new design style in the out in the wild, and it’s a pretty decent effort overall. Style-wise, this is only a very slight evolution from the previous “red line” platform maps, but overall the changes are for the better.
Following best practices, the map now highlights stations in the direction of travel (here, southbound from Mount Baker station), making it very clear where a rider can go from the platform they’re standing on. Station labels are all set slightly bolder than on previous maps, which allows the new “Downtown Seattle” and “UW Campus” labels to be easily differentiated. I’m not crazy about the execution of these new labels, but they get the job done, I guess.
It’s interesting to note that the icon for the highlighted “you are here” station gets enlarged a bit, which pushes the station’s name to the right a bit, no longer aligning vertically with all the other labels. This draws your eye in because it looks subtly different, so it’s actually a very effective little bit of design – look here first!
On the subject of the icons: Seattle is stuck with them for the foreseeable future, but at least they’re looking as good as possible. They used to be constrained inside circles, but they actually look much better and more visually distinct from each other floating free like they are on this map.
The map’s legend is clear and concise, but I have a couple of minor quibbles. I like to group like things together when I make a legend, so it seems a bit jarring to have alternative transportation connections like monorail, Sounder and streetcar broken up by parking (which I’d put last on this list). “Sounder” also isn’t a very meaningful name for those unfamiliar with Seattle – “Sounder commuter rail” would be more descriptive and useful – although that longer label wouldn’t fit into the legend box as neatly!
Of course, as nice as this map is, the real test of this design style will be when East Link opens in 2023 and there’s a new line that doesn’t run neatly north-south. I look forward to seeing how that particular challenge will be tackled!
Our final word: Very solid work, though perhaps an interim solution that will need reworking once Seattle has more than one light rail line.
Source: Photo from Chris, straightened and cleaned up by Transit Maps.
After teasing this for a while now, SEPTA has finally dropped their recommendations for a completely revamped (and long overdue!) rapid rail network map and wayfinding system. And I have to say, I’m cautiously optimistic about things so far.
Note: The image above is a screenshot of an online interactive map that omits the map’s title and legend. The printed map has this information included.
The first and most obvious difference when compared to previous versions (the map has remained largely unchanged since my review way back in 2011 – Cam) is the complete de-emphasis of the regional rail network. It’s been reduced to very thin lines right at the bottom of the information hierarchy, with only select interchange and terminal stations shown. This makes things very clear that this is a map devoted to the new “Metro” branding – rapid rail transit. Hopefully, service can live up this name in reality!
The near-elimination of the regional rail finally allows the subway-surface trolley lines (now designated as “T” for “trolley”) to be depicted with a much higher degree of accuracy, which I find very welcome. Cased lines show which segments are street running or underground, which works well for the “T” lines, though I find it less useful for the other subway lines. It just seems overly fussy, perhaps?
Breaking all the lines down into their service patterns and showing them individually works really, really well and is very intuitive: B1 = Broad Street Local; B2= Broad Street Express; B3 = Broad-Ridge Express… it’s all very clear.
The new colours for some lines will take a bit of getting used to, I’m sure, but it’s a nice vivid palette that works well together. Fuschia for the “D” lines is a welcome change from a green that was only ever-so-slightly different to the trolley lines.
As this map is just a proposal, there’s a few things that do seem less than finished: the shape of the rivers seems a bit rough, for example, and there’s a couple of non-standard angles on roads that really look out of place. I personally don’t think there’s a huge benefit in showing roads that key bus routes don’t run along: they just introduce another layer of information that isn’t that important and compete visually with the bus lines and regional rail. I do think the route numbers for the bus lines are too small and light to be read easily.
Including points of interest is welcome, but there’s only two (plus parks) on the map at the moment – the stadiums and the Museum of Art. Is this enough to warrant the inclusion of this type of information, or should a few more select locations be included?
Similarly, neighborhood designations are always a good thing to include on a diagram of this regional scale, but they all seem a bit small and and indistinct to be quickly readable to me. “North Philly” and “South Philly” also seem a bit informal for a transit map, though I’ll bow to local usage here if that’s what everyone calls them.
The spacing of stations on the D1 could be made a bit more even, and the way that some station names on the D2 have to flip sides to accommodate the Media/Elwyn regional rail line (much lower in the information hierarchy, remember?) is unfortunate.
I would expect that many of these minor problems will be sorted as the design progresses, but really, this is a very promising start. Even better is the implementation of the individual line diagrams, which takes a bunch of disjointed, inconsistent and just plain unattractive maps and turns them into a clear, cohesive suite of modern diagrams that work as part of a larger whole. Just lovely.
Of course, these diagrams don’t stand alone, but are part of a comprehensive wayfinding package that merits a detailed look. Read about the master plan here, and view an interactive version of the system map that explains a lot of the decision-making process here. You can even leave feedback on what you think of the proposed wayfinding.
Our final word: Borne out of a lot of research, this is a brave new start for SEPTA and is to be applauded. It’s not perfect by any means, but I like the direction its headed in.
Here’s the official bus map of Leiria, a small Portuguese city with around 50,000 people living inside its urban perimeter.
In my opinion, this map is a mess and completely useless since I was never able to use it while riding the bus. Although it gives us an idea of the lines, it has too little information and it’s too confusing.
What do you think?
Transit Maps says:
I’m with you, Tiago – this really isn’t very useful at all. Rather than having any sense of scale or how the network physically relates to the geography of the city, it’s just an overly stylised and simplistic overview map. In a way, it comes across more as a decorative illustration than a map – pretty, but not actually functional.
The version on the agency’s website is “interactive” in that each line highlights as you mouse over it (with the others fading down), but even that’s only slightly useful. Clicking on a line takes you to the relevant schedule page, which is nice. However, the schedules themselves are also over-designed and not immediately intuitive… everything is just harder work than it should be.
On the positive side, the icons used to indicate points of interest are generally clear and easily understandable, though I’d like some consistency on the bug bus icon used to indicate interurban bus service… only one of them has an indication of where these buses actually go. Again, really useful stuff to know! The “blobby dot” station tick is an interesting approach I haven’t seen before – it certainly fits with the style of the map.
Our final word: Simple, bright, colorful… and not really very useful. Definitely an example of form over function that can only serve as a very simplistic overview of the network.
Here’s a map that’s been a long time coming, and one that I think has been worth the wait. I’ve wanted to make a transit map of historical streetcar routes in my adopted home town of Portland, Oregon for at least five years now, but it’s always seemed like a very daunting task. The success of my historical Spokane streetcar map from earlier this year finally gave me the tools I needed to get this map done, and this map is very definitely a deliberate companion piece to it.
At its height, the Portland Railway Light & Power Company’s city streetcar network had more than 35 routes, plus a few extra stub lines run by independent companies. Finding a way to clearly map these lines in the dense downtown area always seemed impossible to me, and I’ve made many terrible attempts at it over the years. It wasn’t until I made my Spokane map that I realised that I could simply bundle similar routes together into colour-coded trunk lines, which finally gave me the spark that this Portland map needed to work.
A City of Bridges
In Spokane, I grouped lines by the street they left downtown on, but for Portland there was an even better distinguishing feature: the bridges across the Willamette River. Each bridge had its own unique streetcar loop pattern in downtown Portland – for example, cars across the Broadway Bridge would run counter-clockwise on Broadway, Washington Street, Fifth Street (now Fifth Avenue), and Glisan Street, with the nominal “terminus” being at the intersection of Broadway and Washington.
So I simply grouped routes that used the five bridges of the time (three of which still stand today!) – from north to south being the Broadway, Railroad/Steel, (old) Burnside, (old) Morrison and Hawthorne. Remaining lines were then given other colours to denote if they ran along Washington Street on the west side, or if they were were crosstown or stub lines. The few remaining independent lines round out the forty-one (yes, 41!) lines shown on this map. Only one new streetcar line would be constructed after this date: the 1920 Municipal Terminal line from St. Johns to the city-owned docks on the Willamette. I chose to represent 1915 instead of 1920 because I came across a Pittmon Guide map from that year that included a diagram showing exactly how all the downtown loops worked and which lines used them – an invaluable aid that I’d never seen before, reproduced below.
Note: There’s one error in that Vancouver cars physically couldn’t have gone from Second Street to Glisan Street and then over the Railroad Bridge but must have used Flanders Street like the other Railroad Bridge cars, but the rest seems accurate and consistent with all my other research.
Of Streets and Avenues
Street names used on this map reflect the more chaotic Portland of 1915, rather than today’s orderly quadrant-based address system with streets running east-west and avenues running north-south. Many street names were different, there were only 20 numbers per block, and only streets on the east side had a directional modifier before their name (East Burnside, East Glisan, etc.) and then only if there was an equivalent street on the (older) west side – Belmont and Hawthorne didn’t have such a modifier, for example. In the far south-east portion of the city, a completely different system was in use, giving rise to names like 72nd Street S.E. On the west side, Burnside Street ran only from the Willamette to the intersection of 16th Street; further west was actually a continuation of Washington Street.
A Tale of Two Grids
Because of the denser network on the west side of the Willamette, this map uses two distinctly different grids – one that adheres to the city’s underlying numerical grid on the east side, and an enlarged one for the west side that also takes into account the double-width blocks west of 16th Street. The highlighted downtown area only shows streets that tracks run along or are necessary to make certain streets align properly to each other, so it really only gives a general indication of the street grid. I pondered long and hard over labelling streets here, but it just seemed too busy in the end. Your thoughts on this approach would be welcome!
Other Notes
The map also includes the two PRL&P interurban electric lines running to distant destinations like Troutdale, Gresham, Cazadero and Bull Run; the locations of the system’s carbarns and workshops (TriMet still has shops at Center Street, though they serve buses now); as well as city parks that were known to exist in 1915. Not shown are the extensive Oregon Electric and Southern Pacific interurban electric lines to Corvallis, Salem and Eugene, as they just seemed outside the scope of this PRL&P-centric city lines map.
One line to take note of is the Bridge Transfer line, which literally connects all the bridges on the east side of the river. Most sources I’ve seen have it running from the Broadway Bridge along Larrabee and Holladay to Grand Avenue and then south to its terminus at East Lincoln Street. However, I believe that at this time it actually ran south from Holladay along Union Avenue (today’s MLK, Jr. Blvd.) to East Burnside where it jogged across to Grand Avenue. This is how it’s shown on the little sketch maps that appeared in the Pittmon Guide of the time (see below, note the highlighted “B-T” marker along Union Avenue), and making use of existing track that wasn’t in use by any other line at the time (By 1920, the Vancouver line was rerouted over the Burnside Bridge instead of the Steel Bridge and it ran along Union Avenue north of East Burnside).
For the most part, Portland used letter codes on the headboards of their streetcars, and these are reflected on the route name bullets used on the map: even the strange ones like “L” for Mississippi Street cars, “U” for Williams Avenue, or “WR” and “WW” for Richmond and Woodstock cars: the initial “W” stands for “Waverly”, a neighborhood designation that was gradually dropped. Cars up to Council Crest (the most famous Portland streetcar route) were still known as “PH” or “Portland Heights” in 1915; the “CC” or “Council Crest” designation didn’t come into full effect until after World War 2, though it does seem like the terms were partly interchangeable at the time (see the map above which has both PH and CC markers).
Conclusion
The second in a series of maps showing historical streetcar networks of the Pacific Northwest, and a deeply satisfying one to make. Will there be more maps in this series? Only time will tell. I’d love to do Seattle one day – maybe! As always, your thoughts, comments and corrections are welcome below, and prints are available in the Transit Maps store.
