All posts tagged: California

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 […]

Fantasy Map: Mock-Up Boston MBTA Map Spotted in LA for Filming

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Fantasy Maps, Popular Culture

Posted by Seiji Tanaka on his Twitter account, here’s a fictional MBTA map at an LA Metro station for film/TV shooting. The map is at the fictional “Rockwater” station on the equally fictional Yellow Line (replacing the real world Orange Line). We’ve covered fictional transit maps from TV shows and movies before (this weird DC Metro map from the TV show “Leverage” springs to mind), but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one where the […]

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 […]

Submission – Fantasy Map: Pacific Northwest (USA and Canada) Regional Rail

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Fantasy Maps

Submitted by opspe, who says: This is my concept for what an integrated regional inter-city rail network in the Northwest could look like, if things had developed that way.  All there is now (regionally) is Cascades, which I ride all the time, but it’s still rather limited.  I decided to include the local commuter rail lines (WES, Sounder, WCE) too.  I also decided to beef up CalTrans a bit – they don’t actually serve Redding, although it’s […]

Historical Map: Opening of the Los Angeles Metro Red Line, January 30, 1993

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Historical Maps

A very simple map showing the first segment of Los Angeles’ Red Line on its opening in January 1993. The Blue Line (part of which is also shown on this map) had opened three years earlier. The map is mainly notable for the “RTD” logo that belonged to the Southern California Regional Transit District, the immediate ancestor of today’s Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA, or more commonly, just “Metro”). In fact, the LACMTA […]

Historical Map: Comprehensive Rapid Transit Plan for the City and County of Los Angeles, 1925

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Historical Maps

This is one of the earliest plans commissioned by the City and County of Los Angeles. The consultants – Kelker, De Leuw and Co. of Chicago – were asked to create a plan to accommodate a future city population of three million. Metro’s own history archive has this to say about the project: The plan shows a number of proposed immediate and future subways: one across Hollywood to La Brea Boulevard, another from downtown to […]

Unofficial Map: Los Angeles Metro for the “Analogue Guide: Los Angeles”

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Unofficial Maps

Submitted by Stefan, who says: Hi Cameron, I thought I’d share the Los Angeles Metro map that we designed for the Analogue Guide Los Angeles. We always include “alternative” transit maps in our guide books, such Eddie Jabbour’s KickMap or Mark Noad’s Tubemap. In Los Angeles, given the sheer lack of maps, we designed one in-house. It would be great to hear your thoughts on it! Transit Maps says: Thanks for sharing, Stefan! This is quite a neat […]