Produced for the Sierra Club and very nicely done indeed. Having Yosemite and Yellowstone as the main “hubs” seems very appropriate. Sadly, I’ve only been to three of these parks – Grand Teton, Yellowstone and Crater Lake – something I’ll have to remedy. Finally, I love the disclaimer: *So incredibly not to scale and also fictional. Source: @BRFoo/Twitter
This map has to be from before 1980, as that’s the year that Braintree station opened. Certainly has a nice 1970s feel to it. I love how someone has added in the more recent stations with a pen, even (somewhat) attempting to maintain the aesthetics of the map. Source: @acosmos/Twitter
After posting a photo of a vintage Cleveland RTA rapid transit map, I was curious as to what the current map looked like. Oh dear. Maybe I shouldn’t have looked. Have we been there? No. What we like: Sadly, the best thing about this map is the nicely retro-styled RTA agency logo. As for the rest… What we don’t like: Multiple angles for route lines instead of the standard 45-degrees looks messy and poorly thought […]
This looks like it may be affixed to a door or wall of an old train carriage (see the window just above the placard), which means the type on the rail map is incredibly small. The naming of the main railway station as “Public Square” rather than “Tower City” means this map is pre-1991 (when the station changed names), although the general aesthetics and typography would lead me to suspect that this map is from […]
transportationnation: From Oaklandish: an ambitious 1956 BART prototype map. Some might say a little overly ambitious!
Apparently, these strip maps are fairly new. I’m all in favour of wayfinding elements that help people plan their journey, but there’s some parts of this that definitely make this feel like a first draft, rather than a finished piece. The overlapping terminus dots at Millbrae and Daly City look a little odd, and the giant silhouette of a BART train indicating direction of travel is almost totally unnecessary. The real problem, though, is the […]
Here’s a gorgeous pre-CTA planning map from Chicago in 1945, outlining all sorts of grandiose ideas for expansion of the subway system, almost none of which have actually come to pass. There appears to be a proposed second Loop, which would have run more east-west than the existing one. There’s also a planned subway line heading out to the northwest, but this doesn’t follow the same alignment as the Blue Line, and a subway line […]
Time for another entry in the Worst Map Contest, and this one, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, is right up there with the very worst. Have we been there? No, and on the evidence of this map, I’m not sure I want to. What we like: I will say that the labelling of the street grid along the edges is actually a very clever idea that frees up the centre of the map for the routes. What […]
While not strictly speaking a transit map, this awesome cutaway diagram of the Hudson River Tubes featured in our last post is just too cool not to share with you. Contemporaneous with that map, this cutaway shows the junction to the northern (or Uptown) cross-Hudson tubes which leave the image to the right. Of particular interest is how the lines stack and twist around each other, almost certainly done to minimise the width of any […]
Basically an advertisement for the newly-opened Hudson River Tubes — still in use by PATH trains today, over 100 years later — with the H&M lines proudly and boldly displayed in red. Planning for the future is also on display, making the service look somewhat bigger than it really was. From my limited research, it seems that the extensions shown in Manhattan were never actually built. The Hudson Terminal Buildings (shown in the photo inset […]
