All posts tagged: RTD

Submission – Future Official Map: Denver RTD Rail Map for 2016

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Submitted by Steve Boland, who says: Cameron, as long as you’re talking about the new Salt Lake City map, I thought you should know that Denver has just adopted a new, updated but unfortunately only slightly amended version of their map, which of course was/is nearly as comically awful as Salt Lake’s old map. I wish it were possible to shame them into shape. Transit Maps says: Oh dear.  Denver’s map has never been as […]

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 […]

Unofficial Future Map: Metro Denver Rapid Transit by Steve Boland

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Long-time readers will know that I’m not a huge fan of Denver’s current light rail map (April 2013, 2 stars). And it seems that I’m not the only one, as Steve Boland of calurbanist.com has turned his hand to designing a new map. We’ve featured his excellent Bay Area Rapid Transit map previously (Feb. 2013, 4.5 stars). His Denver map includes all the FasTracks extensions – light rail along I-225 through Aurora, BRT lanes on […]

A Better Denver RTD Strip Map?

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People have already asked me what I’d do to make the Denver RTD strip map better. Well, here’s what I’ve come up with in five minutes flat. Even from this quick little “art director’s sketch”, I’m pretty certain that this concept would work better than the current iteration. Once a transit system is past a certain size or complexity, some level of abstraction on these narrow oddly-shaped strip maps is a necessity. Once the rider is […]

Official Map Update: Denver RTD Light Rail West Line, 2013

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Official Maps

Transit Maps reviewed Denver’s light rail map way back in October 2011. We weren’t too impressed with it then, and nothing much has changed with this new edition that marks today’s opening of the new (aqua) West Line out to Golden. The map itself has had to change orientation from portrait to landscape to fit the new route in, which raises the question of how it’s going to fit into existing fittings on trains and […]

Official Map: Denver RTD Light Rail, 2011

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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 […]