DART’s long-awaited Silver Line is opening at the end of October, and the agency already has a map out well in advance, so let’s take a look, shall we? Look, this diagram is perfectly functional and does its job, but there are some absolutely baffling design decisions that have been made. First and foremost is the decision to put a big “Effective September 15, 2025” label on the diagram, and then hiding the fact that […]
The other day, long-time correspondent Edward Russell tweeted a photo of a strip map he’d seen while on the Dallas Streetcar (left). It depicts the DART light rail system, telling riders that they can make a connection with that service at Union Station (at one end of the short streetcar line). However, the execution of the map is almost comically poor: wobbly route lines, clashing labels, uneven spacing of stations and more. One of the […]
Submitted by Kevin, who says: I combined two cool developments I’ve seen in transit maps on the internet, the isometric map from Stuttgart (October 2011, 5 stars) and GIFs of the evolution of a system. I lived in Dallas for school and again as a professional and while the network could be better, I always enjoyed riding the DART. And actually the system really lent itself to the map principles that seemed to work for […]
Submitted by Kara Fischer, who says: I think I may have a new map for your Hall of Shame! Here’s the official map for A-Train service in Texas. That yellow line’s VERY hard to see on the pale background; there’s much more emphasis on the street grid and the lakes. And those station icons! I can’t tell what five of them are, and it’s absolutely ridiculous to only label them in the legend! Why can’t […]
The McKinney Avenue Trolley in Dallas, Texas is opening its loop extension tomorrow, June 6th. Working with MATA (the non-profit operator of the trolley line), I updated the map that I donated to them to reflect this new service (see the final map here). And – with my permission – DART is also using the artwork on pole signs along the route (shown above), presumably at the locations where where DART and the trolley interchange. […]
Here's a small project that was inspired by a message to my Transit Maps blog about the currently existing map for the McKinney Avenue heritage trolley line in Dallas, Texas. However, rather than review and criticise a map produced for a non-profit organisation (most likely by a volunteer or staff in their spare time), I thought that I would create a new, accurate, more user-friendly map instead.
This is pretty much the finished product, I think, barring any major errors. The MATA website states that there are 38 trolley stops along the route, but I can only find 37, even after multiple “drives” along the entire route in Google Street View. I changed the background colour from silver to beige after doing some prints: the whole thing just looked too drab and grey once on paper. This works much better and make […]
Thanks to Michael Champlin for inspiring this little project. I’ve been thinking of doing a more geographically-based map for a while now to break out of the routine of always doing diagrammatic transit maps, so when he sent me a link to the actual map (PDF, 5.6MB) that this heritage streetcar system in Dallas, Texas uses, I knew that something better could be done. So here’s a work-in-progress screenshot. Most of the hard work has […]
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 […]
Gabe says: I’ve been frustrated with the Dallas rail map for a while, and decided to make a comprehensive diagram of Dallas-Fort Worth rail transit. Transit Maps says: Simply put, this is a beautiful diagrammatic map and is far more visually attractive than the official DART map (August 2012, 3 stars). There’s a very elegant, restrained feeling to this: from the subtle grey background and typography to some excellent, slightly unusual colour choices for the […]
