All posts tagged: San Francisco

Submission – Unofficial Unified BART/Muni Metro Map by Jamison Wieser

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Unofficial Maps

Submitted by Jamison, who says: I don’t want to share this map as much as the concept behind it.  San Francisco’s Muni Metro light-rail system and the regional BART heavy-rail system share a subway under Market Street and the five busiest rail stations in the Bay Area. They share a subway, but side-by-side the system maps with radically different designs that don’t share anything in common besides the names of the station. There are 10 […]

Illustration: San Francisco by Jenni Sparks

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Unofficial Maps

Jenni Sparks does her meticulously-detailed-yet-organic illustration thing with San Francisco (we’ve previously featured her great NYC map), with BART and Caltrain (really?) given strong visual prominence. Strangely, there’s not a single Muni Metro train, F Line streetcar or cable car to be seen! Via: 99percentinvisible: A beautiful, detailed, hand-drawn map of San Francisco

Photo: Tactile Muni Metro Map, San Francisco

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Miscellany, Official Maps

Maps in underground stations on the Muni light rail network in San Francisco have raised route designation letters and route lines, as well as braille labels for station names. Nice! I know that it’s entirely happenstance*, but I really appreciate the fact that the M, K, and T lines appear next to each other on the map, making an “MKT” for Market Street. *Historical aside: Muni streetcar letters were originally assigned alphabetically in the order […]

Historical Map: San Francisco BART & Buses Map, September 1977

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Historical Maps

Front cover for a 1977 map of BART and connecting bus services with some great late-1970s typography: tightly spaced Helvetica, yum! That BART icon is also pretty amazing and is just asking to be digitally recreated. However, there’s something screwy about that map, as much of BART appears to be located in or underneath the San Francisco Bay. Global warming, perhaps? Hardly: some quick Photoshop analysis reveals that  the underlying map has simply been erroneously rotated […]

Fantasy Map: North American Metro Map by Mark Knoke

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Fantasy Maps

Obviously inspired by – and clearly credited as such – the brilliant xkcd “Subways of North America” map, here’s a quite staggeringly detailed map of pretty much every rail-based rapid transit system in North America, including future expansions and upcoming new systems like Honolulu’s HART elevated light rail. Like the xkcd map, all the systems link up at their termini to form one giant Metro map that spans the entire continent. True, the map isn’t […]

Historical Map: The Burlington Route (Chicago to San Francisco), 1879

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Historical Maps

Here’s a beautiful map from the glory days of American railroading, showing the route from Chicago to San Francisco via Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and California. Amtrak’s modern-day California Zephyr still calls at many of the same locations between Chicago and Omaha to the east and from Elko to Oakland in the west, but takes a different route through the middle, using Colorado instead of Wyoming. Although presented as one continuous route, the […]

Historical Map: San Francisco Muni Transit Routes, 1970

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Historical Maps

For a long period of time, the San Francisco Municipal Railway, (commonly shortened to just “Muni”) used pretty much exactly the same map in their brochures. It seems that each year, they’d simply make any amendments required – addition of new routes, deletion of old ones, etc. –  and then reprint the brochure/map in a new colour combination. The earliest example I can find, from 1952, uses a sombre two-color palette of black and red, […]