All posts tagged: Portland

Submission – New Official Map: TriMet System Map, Portland, Oregon, 2017

September 13, 2017
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Sent my way by Jonathan, a designer at TriMet, who has this to say: We just launched a couple new and improved maps: TriMet System and City Center. This was a long overdue update that brings those maps in line with the Rail System map that we’ve had for a few years. A few highlights: Bus lines, rail lines and streets have standardized angles, but still adhere (mostly) to geography Colors and symbols are standardized […]

Project: Streetcars and Electric Railways in Portland, 1920

July 31, 2016
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It's safe to say that I'm fascinated with the rich transit history of my adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon, and it's certainly something that I've explored before. This new project started out with a very simple goal – to produce a route map of Portland streetcars at their zenith in 1920 that showed each line separately – but it quickly grew into something much more.

New Project/Work-in-Progress – Historical Map: Streetcar Lines of Portland, Oregon, 1920

July 23, 2016
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Despite Portland once having one of the largest streetcar networks in the United States, finding reliable, empirical information about it is surprisingly difficult. Books about the history of the streetcar – like Richard Thompson’s series of books or John Labbe’s Fares Please! – tend to be more photographs and captions than exhaustive detail, internet sources are incomplete and at times contradictory, and even contemporaneous sources are frustratingly incorrect. A much-referenced Pittmon map of streetcar lines […]

Photo: Maps in Repurposed Transit Shelter, Portland, Oregon

March 16, 2016
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This small cafe on Fifth Avenue in Portland is housed in one of the last remaining bus shelters from the pre-2007 transit mall, and (awesomely) still retains the maps and informational signage of that vintage.  To the left is the transit mall directory, featuring the last iteration of Portland’s icon-based route grouping – a beaver for routes to the southeast, a leaf for southern routes, a rose for southwest routes, and a deer for those […]

Official “Map”: Portland Streetcar Conceptual Diagram

September 18, 2015
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While I may be undecided about certain elements of the new official Portland Streetcar map, I do quite like this simple little diagram that can be found on their website. With a minimum of fuss, it shows the two new loop lines, the two bridges they cross over the Willamette River on and the four distinct neighbourhoods that they link together. Okay, so the NS Line looks a little vestigial, but let’s let the loop […]

Official Map: Portland Streetcar, 2015

September 17, 2015
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Amidst all the hoopla surrounding the opening of the new MAX light rail Orange Line, it’s easy to forget that Portland’s streetcar is now also running over the new Tilikum Crossing bridge. They’ve taken this opportunity to rework their system map to bring it more in line with their new branding – check out the rather nice new logo at the top left of the map, which doesn’t look half bad on the streetcars themselves. […]

Photo: Portland TriMet MAX Light Rail “Catch the Orange” Promotional Map

September 11, 2015
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Portland’s new Orange Line light rail opens tomorrow!  And while I’m excited, I’ve long wondered why exactly it’s being called the Orange Line instead of just being an extension of the Yellow Line. I’ve heard mutterings that it allows operational flexibility – with some northbound Orange Line trains becoming Green Line trains if demand requires it – but that’s always seemed like pretty weak reasoning to me. And this promotional map almost entirely abandons that idea […]

Submission – West Coast Electric Highway Map

July 3, 2015
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Submitted by “Sounder Bruce”, who says: A quasi-transit map that shows electric vehicle charging stations in Washington and Oregon, centered around the Interstate 5 corridor. Transit Maps says: I really like the idea behind this map – a simplified road map much in the vein of many of my own mapping projects – but I feel like the execution lets the concept down a little.  Because of the stylised “transit map” format, the distances between […]

Submission – Portland MAX Light Rail Yellow/Orange Line Interlining Graphic

June 23, 2015
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Submitted by Breck, who says: Here’s a neat little animated map and explanation that show how the new MAX Orange Line will tie into the rest of the system in downtown Portland. Like many other transit fans, I too have wondered how the Orange Line will work and why it won’t just be a simple extension of the Yellow Line. It is all explained here, and the reasoning seems to make pretty good sense. Transit […]

Historical Maps: Rail Transit in North America, 1984 by Dennis McClendon

January 16, 2015
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I thought I was all done with “to scale” maps of North American rail systems, but then Dennis McClendon (see previous posts from him) sent in this beautiful series of maps that he produced for Planning magazine back in 1984. Dennis himself says: Given this week’s Tumblr theme, I thought you might be interested in these maps that I did in 1984, when I worked for Planning magazine. The “new wave” of modern light rail […]