If you’ve reached this page from a search engine hit, please note that this is not the official NJ Transit page, but an independent review of the map as it stood in 2011. If you want to see the current official map, then follow this link [PDF]. If you love transit maps and diagrams, then please stick around and read the review – and more – on this site! This morning, an interesting tweet came […]
A fascinating snapshot in time of the full extent of the great Pacific Electric Railway Company’s operations in Los Angeles and southern California. The famous “Red Cars”, a combination of streetcars and interurban light rail spanned vast distances at a time before the car had truly entered the American way of life. Within 30 years, most of this system – the “largest electric railway system in the world” – had been replaced by motorcoach services […]
Having showcased some excellent transit map design, it’s time to see what happens when it all goes horribly wrong. This monstrosity is the official map – available on the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority’s website – for the light rail system of Buffalo, New York. My eyes hurt. Have we been there? No. What we like: It tells us where the trains stop. That is all. What we don’t like: Where to begin? The hilarious usage […]
Here’s a transit map that can’t seem to make up its mind whether it is a rectilinear diagram or a geographically accurate map, and it ends up paying a price for that indecision. Overlaying the routes on a city-wide street grid can work well (see the Barcelona map posted previously), but here it seems to force the routes to be subservient to their geography, rather than the other way around. The labelling of the roads […]
Somewhat related to my previous post, here’s a new transit map of Portland for your perusal. This piece was born out of two things – a friendly after-work chat with the immensely talented Ryan Sullivan of Paste In Place, where we discussed a concept similar to this; and a chance discovery of a high-resolution scan of a 1943 streetcar/trolley map on the amazing Vintage Oregon site. Based on that map, and information gleaned from too […]
Here’s a new transit diagram that I’ve been working on for a while now – a unified rail transit map for the place I live, Portland, Oregon. Portland is blessed with fantastic public transportation, but I’ve always felt that the official TriMet system diagram fails to fully show this, even after its recent redesign. The official diagram only shows TriMet’s services – the MAX light rail and WES commuter rail – relegating the important Portland […]
