All posts tagged: USA

Historical Map: New York IRT Sytem Baseball Season Opening Map, 1923

November 1, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Historical Maps
Tags:

A simple little map from “The Elevated Express” gazette showing the convenience of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company’s services to “all three parks” – Ebbets Field (Brooklyn Dodgers), Polo Grounds (New York Giants) and Yankee Stadium (New York Yankees). The last stadium is of particular interest as this is the year that it opened – the first game at Yankee Stadium was held April 18th, 1923 against the Boston Red Sox. According to the New […]

Historical Map: Boston Rapid Transit Map in Type 6 Mock-up Carriage, c. 1968

October 30, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Historical Maps
Tags:

Here’s a variant Boston MBTA map I’ve never seen before: a version with 60-degree angled lines, instead of 45 degrees. Apart from that, it looks very much like the standard late-1960s/early 1970s Cambridge 7 spider map, although there’s some weird inconsistencies like the Green Line “A” Watertown branch (closed 1968) and Quincy Center (opened 1971) on the same map. Here’s the interesting part. This map lives in the one and only mock-up of an MBTA […]

Official Map: Port Authority of Allegheny County Full System Map, 2013

October 24, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Official Maps
Tags:

While researching yesterday’s post about Pittsburgh’s light rail map, I came across this, the full system map – showing light rail, BRT (busways) and buses – produced by the Port Authority of Allegheny County and available on their website. That’s right: the map image has been sliced up into multiple .png files and placed into an HTML table. A table with a staggering fifty-one separate cells. It’s like a time warp back to 1996 or […]

Submission – Official Map: Pittsburgh Light Rail System Map, 2013

October 23, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Official Maps
Tags:

Submitted by Dan Daly, who says: Here is the Pittsburgh light rail map. I would love to hear your thoughts on it. In my opinion it is kinda useless not because of it’s design but because it only covers the light rail. Very little of the urban part of the city is actually covered in this map. If the busways were fully included with station names and the links to the T stops it would […]

Historical Map: San Francisco Muni Transit Routes, 1970

October 23, 2013
comments 2
Filed Under:
Historical Maps
Tags:

For a long period of time, the San Francisco Municipal Railway, (commonly shortened to just “Muni”) used pretty much exactly the same map in their brochures. It seems that each year, they’d simply make any amendments required – addition of new routes, deletion of old ones, etc. –  and then reprint the brochure/map in a new colour combination. The earliest example I can find, from 1952, uses a sombre two-color palette of black and red, […]

Submission: New Washington, DC Metro Strip Map at Pentagon City

October 22, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Official Maps
Tags:

Submitted by Peter Dovak, who says:  Spotted a new schematic installed at Pentagon City Metro station in Washington this week. I’m not sure if this is experimental or what, but I’ve never seen such detailed line info at a station here before. Not a huge fan of the execution, though, the labels are awful skewed! Transit Maps says: In the limited space allowed here, angled station labels are pretty much the only workable option. It’s […]

Official Map: Tri-Rail Commuter Rail, Southern Florida, 2013

October 11, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Official Maps
Tags:

I’ve had a couple of requests to review this one, so here goes… For me, this map is an excellent example of the overwhelming averageness of a lot of transit mapping here in the US. Yes, it does the job – you can work out how to get from here to there and where to make connections – but it’s just so completely bland and unmemorable. Everything about the map seems to be completely generic, […]

Historical Map: San Diego “Park Line” Bus Route Map, June 1978

October 1, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Historical Maps
Tags:

Looks like tightly-spaced Avant Garde was totally in vogue in 1978 (see also this Portland, Oregon bus map). This is a charmingly naive little map, complete with scratchy pen and ink drawings of points of interest, a lovely ornate north pointer (another 1970s typeface with some great swashes!) and an adorable little green hand pointing at the downtown inset. It even clearly shows all relevant street names and interchanges with other routes. What’s not to […]

Historical Map: TriMet Bus System Map, Portland, Oregon, 1978

September 27, 2013
comments 3
Filed Under:
Historical Maps
Tags:

Not much use for route planning: this map was really made just to show how the routes that ran into the city centre were grouped into geographic regions and denoted by a colour and an icon. While stops along the transit mall are now marked with boring old letters, back then these cheery and oh-so-1970s symbols guided you to the bus stop you needed. Also very 1970s: the tightly-kerned Avant Garde typeface. Source: TriMet’s “How […]

Historical Map: Boston Rapid Transit Map, early 1980s

September 25, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Historical Maps
Tags:

Submitted by “Some Assembly Required” who says: I’ve been enjoying your site for some time and recently remembered that I have an old MBTA system map in my basement. It came into my possession via a roommate over 20 years ago; I’m not sure how that person came to have it, but it probably wasn’t entirely legal. It’s a piece of metal (some sort of tin?) so I believe it was removed from a station. […]