All posts tagged: Spokane

Project: A Map of Electric Rail Service in Spokane, Washington in 1912

March 17, 2021
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Historical Maps, My Transit Maps
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Old streetcar maps often do a very poor job of actually showing how the routes ran – often just drawing an otherwise unmarked red line down the middle of roads on a standard cartographic map without any explanation of stops, loops or route names (see left for an example). Finding accurate information about the actual routing of individual lines can be a long and thankless process, so when long-time Transit Maps correspondent Karl Otterstrom tweeted […]

Historical Map: Washington Motor Coach Routes, 1923

June 24, 2020
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Here’s a delightful hand drawn and lettered map showing the burgeoning network of motor coach routes in Washington state in 1923. It would seem to have been produced as an accompaniment to an application for an additional route crossing the Cascades – shown as a yellow dashed line on the map – joining two previously unconnected segments of service. Of note is the extensive service into the Olympic Peninsula by means of a joint thru-service […]

Historical Map: Pullman, Washington, 1911 – The Palouse Country

May 11, 2020
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This handsome birds-eye view map of eastern Washington State comes from the Pullman Primer, a prospectus put together by the Pullman Chamber of Commerce in 1911 to attract business to the city. It shows the city nestled in the foreground, surrounded by the fertile lands of the Palouse, with Seattle and Portland in the far distance. All across the plains stretch the lines of the many and varied railroad companies of the day, connecting Pullman […]

Future Map: Cascadia High-Speed Rail Network by Oran Viriyincy

February 14, 2018
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Created on behalf of a new advocacy group for true high-speed rail in the Pacific Northwest – the aptly named CascadiaRail – this is probably my favourite map of 2018 so far. It’s clear, beautiful, representative of the region, and is wonderfully aspirational – presenting a clear and exciting vision of a possible future. I especially like that there’s no state or national borders shown at all: the region is instead defined by the natural […]

Historical Map: 1980 Spokane Transit System Tourmap

May 23, 2014
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Check out this eye-poppingly bright bus map from Spokane, Washington, brought to my attention by Zachary Ziegler of the Transit 509 blog. Produced by a local design firm, this seems to be the first attempt at any sort of bus map in Spokane. It’s notable for the interesting way that the route lines overprint each other when they cross, which creates an interesting sort of plaid pattern where many routes meet downtown. Adorable little colour-coded […]

Official Map: Bus Transit of Spokane, Washington, 2012

February 9, 2012
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Well, it certainly didn’t take long for people to set me right after my blanket statement that bus maps are “just” boring old geographically-accurate road maps with routes on them. I’ve had a flood of submissions, comments and tweets on the subject, complete with links to some very interesting examples of bus-only maps. This one, from the city of Spokane in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, definitely caught my eye. For a fairly […]