A great old map of transit from Salt Lake City, showing bus lines (in green), trolleybus lines (in red, and curiously referred to as “electric coaches”, a designation that only seems to have been used here), and the one last remaining streetcar line (in blue). Even that seems to be on its last legs, as the legend says that Line 5 could be served by “street car or gas bus”. I believe the last streetcar ran in […]
Submitted by Tony, who says: Hi, I created this map because I always wished someone would. I am not a designer, I am an IT Manager. Please let me know what you think! Transit Maps says: For an IT manager, this is a pretty accomplished effort, Tony! (And it just goes to show how little we should define ourselves by one label – everyone is capable of excelling at so many different things.) Really, this […]
Submitted by Linda, who says: MBTA Red Line Order of Stations (Harvard to Ashmont) sign on old retired Red Line car, Transit Day 2017, Seashore Trolley Museum, Kennebunkport, ME. Transit Maps says: A diagram of services along a rail line is – in its most basic form – nothing more than a list of stations served, so this sign actually works quite efficiently. It’s also similar to many railroad timetables, which read down for service […]
Here’s an absolutely wonderful diagram of rail in Indianapolis in 1907 that pares everything down to the absolute minimum required to tell the story. 43 completely evenly-spaced railroad lines (representing 18 steam lines and 25 interurbans, according to the source) enter the city, which is encircled by the aptly named Belt Railroad. The names of those 43 outer destinations spiral dramatically around the edge of the map, though the flow is perhaps broken a bit […]
Here’s a great late-1970s diagram that I haven’t seen before of Philadelphia’s subway-surface trolley lines. From the looks of things, this might well have been a strip map within the trolley cars themselves. The subway-surface lines are given full prominence here, with the rest of Philly’s rapid transit rail system represented by very thin route lines mainly confined to the right third of the map. The five trolley routes are treated very diagrammatically, each following […]
Submitted by alr2659, who says: I found this map of the MBTA commuter rail zones in the Central Square T station on the red line in Cambridge. Strangely, this station does not have any commuter rail service, so I’m not sure why this was there at all. I guess I’ll start with the obvious part: those colors are pretty hideous, and the mud-brown color used for zone 1A does a really good job making it […]
Here’s a new “map” that I’ve designed – a cartogram of State Route or State Highway shields for each U.S. state, plus the District of Columbia. Each shield is numbered in the order that each state joined the Union, so Delaware is “1″, Pennsylvania is “2″ and so on… all the way up to D.C, which is cheekily represented with a “51?”, referencing the ongoing statehood debate there. I originally put this together as a quick Twitter post, as […]
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 […]
An unused test diagram for Boston’s rapid transit network from 1991. It attempts to name every station on the branches of the Green Line, but with the unfortunate side effect of completely dominating the design. The poor old Blue Line gets shoved into the top right, and the northern part of the Orange Line doesn’t fare much better. In short, the whole thing is hideously unbalanced, and I’m very glad that this concept didn’t advance […]
A great old map on a subject matter very dear to my heart – the Interstate Highway System. Produced in 1961 by the Caterpillar Tractor Company, who stood to gain a great deal in the construction work required to complete the network, it shows the proposed completed network in white, sections under construction with blue dashes, and – somewhat counter-intuitively – sections that are open to traffic in red. It’s immediately apparent how little of […]
