The early history of the United States is filled with explorers and pioneers making use of rivers as “rapid transit” to quickly travel through otherwise inhospitable or unknown lands. So it makes sense that someone would attempt to show this network in the simplified form of a subway map, and here is one such example by Theo Rindos.

Of course, such a map instantly puts me in mind of Daniel Huffman’s superb series of river/subway maps, but Daniel’s series concentrates more on individual watersheds than the USA as a whole and is a very different beast.

Overall, the map is quite attractive and the comprehensive legend is useful and informative. However, the inclusion of some of the rivers on the map seems somewhat arbitrary to me – most of the “main line” rivers seem to be chosen in order of descending main branch length, but then the Yellowstone River is included instead of a large number of longer rivers. The secondary list of “bus routes” similarly skips quite a few rivers, possibly with the intent of including maps like the Hudson and Sacramento in regions that lack longer rivers. 

This does have the result of producing a nicer-looking network which spans the entire country, but at the cost of making sense of the underlying data (which is missing certain longer rivers simply because they couldn’t fit). The inclusion of all three parts of the Platte River is particularly noticeable in this regard as they obviously are there to create a “connecting bus service” between the Colorado and Missouri Rivers.

Also a little odd is Theo’s two-letter abbreviation for each line, which insists on using “R” for “river” as the second letter. This gives us the non-useful designation of “UR” for the Columbia River, as the Colorado has already taken the more obvious “CR”. A better approach would be to use the two-letter state abbreviations for those rivers that share a state’s name, and then more meaningful codes for the remaining rivers. Thus, the Colorado would be “CO”, and the Columbia could then perhaps be “CU” or “CR”.

Finally, Mountain Home, Idaho is some 12 miles distant from the Snake River – the nearest town of any size that actually sits on the river would actually be Glenns Ferry. I can’t comment on the accuracy of other city names further east.

Our rating: Cherrypicks the underlying data a bit to create a comprehensive network, but looks pretty nifty. Three stars.

Source: Reddit