Submitted by a few people—sorry for the delay in getting to this!—including Shameek, who says:
Phoenix is opening the new southern light rail extension and splitting the system into two separate lines, so naturally they released a new map! I like some of the ideas in here, especially the downtown inset and treating the streetcar equally, but I wanted to hear your take.
Transit Maps says:
It’s always nice when transit systems expand past their first starter line and get to make more interesting diagrams! I quite like the modern, clean design of this one although it seems that the image file has been rendered without anti-aliasing, which gives a curious bitmapped look to the type and other design elements. The icons for park-and-rides and transit centers suffer the most here, as their small reproduction size doesn’t work well with the harsh edges created.
Despite this, the diagram feels balanced, with evenly spaced station labels, neatly designed line designation bullets, clear directional arrows on the one-way segments, a good map legend, and very readable locality labels. Perhaps the Downtown Phoenix box could have a white fill instead of grey to draw the eye to that area a little more, but that’s hardly a dealbreaker. The symbol for the Downtown Phoenix Hub is quite lovely, and the inset map of the area provides just enough context to direct passengers who need to interchange between the two light rail lines. Interestingly, the loop that must exist to for the A Line trains to change direction is omitted – both for design clarity and probably to reinforce that all riders have to leave the train when it arrives at the Washington/Central station.
The one less successful element is the S Line streetcar. Trying to fit a small local service onto a diagram with a scale as large as this one is a daunting task and keying numbers to a legend is probably the only solution if every stop needs to be named. However, I’m not entirely convinced by the somewhat haphazard order that the stations are numbered in. Stations 9 through 12 are numbered the opposite way to the direction that the streetcar travels in – as clearly shown by the directional arrow – which hardly seems intuitive. Maybe a “join-the-dots” approach where the numbering follows the route from one end to the other and then backtracks along the other one way section could work better? I also think that the green S Line should cross above the blue A Line instead of under it, as it’s very hard to follow here – in fact, it almost looks like Mill Ave/3rd St is an alternate terminus as the route line disappears almost immediately after the station marker.
Our final word: Very competent and clear, despite the unintentional bitmapped look. A bit of extra love when it comes to the depiction of the S Line streetcar would improve it even more.
Source: Valley Metro website