Submitted by Griffin, who says:
Attached is a diagram/sort-of fantasy map I recently made showing all the various rail services and connections in San Francisco. I’ve never been a fan of how Muni shows service connections on their official map – BART is typically included, though never Caltrain, nor BART’s connection to the airport, which I think is a fairly important to have.
I also decided to include the F Market & Wharves street car line, which while not connected that seamlessly to the rest of the Muni “metro” system, still serves as an important line for commuters in the city. Also included is the upcoming central subway expansion on the T Third Street line, which brings the line north into downtown with new underground stops north of market street.
Finally, it’s worth noting that this map depicts Muni’s service patterns prior to all of the various COVID cuts, with all light rail lines continuing downtown under Market Street.
This was the map of any sort that I’ve made, done as a challenge to myself to see if I could even do such a thing. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out (or honestly more shocked I was even able to get it done).
Transit Maps says:
Welcome to the wonderful world of transit map making, Griffin!
This is a good, solid effort that builds upon the existing Muni style to include more unified transit information for travellers, which is pretty much always a good thing. Showing BART all the way down to San Francisco International Airport is a great idea, so well done there. It’d be nice to perhaps show the SamTrans “SFO” bus from the airport terminals to Milbrae (which are timed to connect with Caltrain services) just to provide a more complete picture of transit options at the airport, but that may be outside the scope of a rail diagram like this.
If there’s an area that does need work, it’s the labelling of stations. Even though the official Muni Metro map does it, I will never be in favour of labels that are the same colour as the line they serve – there simply isn’t enough contrast between yellow text and a white background to be easily readable, for example. The different colours used also make the map look disjointed and give visual preference to darker labels. All the labels represent a station, so they should all have the same importance in the diagram’s hierarchy. Pick one dark hue with sufficient contrast to the background – it doesn’t have to be black, as the London Underground map shows – and stick with it throughout.
Similarly, I just can’t endorse labels set all in lower-case. Just don’t. Proper capitalisation of place names aids readability, and looks so much better.
Also, work a bit on the placement of your labels relative to the stations they serve – be consistent with how far away they are and whether they sit above/below or alongside the station symbol. The label for the SF Zoo at the end of the L-Taraval line seems to be floating in empty space, for example.
Finally, this isn’t really a comment on this map but on the whole Market Street arrangement of services, with the F streetcars running on the surface, the Muni Metro cars on the first underground level and BART at the bottom – all requiring some kind of transfer between them. Is this level of detail – splitting all these services up into discrete “boarding areas” joined by a connecting transfer line – necessary on a map like this, or is the detail as shown here okay? It’s something to ponder…
Our last word: A very solid first effort (I’ve seen plenty of unified San Francisco rail maps that aren’t as good as this), though some love could be given to the labelling to make it even better.
Source: Griffin’s website
The thing about the F is that its only similarity with BART is that it runs on tracks. In every other way it’s a lot more like the 7-Haight or 9-San Bruno buses which share its stops. Whether it runs on tracks or tires is not the fundamentally important characteristic of a transit line, when compared to stop spacing, dedicated right of way, span of service and frequency, etc. A map that shows “rail” is just not that good an idea.
(This isn’t complete as a rail map anyway, since it omits the cable cars.)
I do wonder what happens when somebody gets off at Bayshore Caltrain and heads east to try to find the T light rail, as shown on this map.
I like the representation of the many stops on the Muni lines vs. the accessible stops — that’s a nice way to handle a bunch of stops without having to label each one. But it seems like the labeled stops on these lines should be based on importance, not only accessibility — maybe there’s a 1:1 correspondence between those two, but what if Muni starts making other stops accessible? (As they should.) A different approach would just be to mark “major” stops, and use an accessibility ideogram (usually the int’l symbol of access) on the stops that are accessible.
I agree with aaronpriven’s point about not trying to include things just because they happen to be on rails if they act more like buses. And apart from the difficulty in reading the yellow station labels, I think the contrast between the yellow of F and the orange of J is too subtle anyway.
Even though it’s way out of SF, the often-overlooked fact that Silicon Valley (as a big employment centre) is easy to reach on transit, makes me want to move the legend box to the top of the map, bend Caltrain left across the bottom of the map to Mountain View, then add in the VTA Orange line going left to right below it.