Like other college towns, Boulder (pop. 108,000) has an outsized bus system. Unlike other college towns, its system is highly complicated, including service by the regional operator, Metro Denver‘s RTD, specially branded routes subsidized by the City itself, campus and other shuttles, and individual routes funded or run by the State, the County, another transit agency and a nearby town. So is there a map to help make sense of all this? Not really! Like RTD, the City relies on a digital map. The County used to produce a print map, but it was last updated in 2018, before COVID-era service changes. Digital maps are great — users can zoom in for more detail, or click for more information — but their reliance on geography means that complex systems can’t be streamlined and simplified. Nor, obviously, can online maps be posted in shelters. For transit systems, at least, digital maps should complement static maps, not replace them. Anyway, you could say that I got my start as a transit planner when, as media director for the student government, I helped promote the first City- (and university-) funded bus route, the HOP. Go CU!

Notes on Design

I’m not a big fan of strictly diagrammatic bus maps; it’s helpful to show some relationship between bus routes and the streets they run on. But that doesn’t mean complex systems can’t be untangled. CHK America and designers including Oran Viriyincy and Kirill Negoda have made an art form of this — as has Fern K. Hahn, who designed this map of the RTD network, including Boulder. The typeface here is Assistant, the City’s official free font; the color palette is also based on the City brand.

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Like the Bay Area, greater Northern California has too damned many transit operators. There are currently four (long-distance) commuter and intercity rail lines in the region (or three, if the San Joaquins is considered a single line with branches) that are run by three different agencies*, with two more on the way. Arguably, it doesn’t really matter — with infrequent schedules and no timed transfers, or discounts on transfers, these are functionally standalone lines serving separate markets, not an integrated network. But California has a state rail plan calling for greater integration, and in the Bay Area, integration of mapping and wayfinding is already underway. A map of megaregional transit options would be an easy way to raise awareness, simplify entry for new users and reduce barriers to access. (* Technically, the San Joaquin Regional Rail Commission both runs ACE and oversees the San Joaquin Joint Powers Authority, which runs the San Joaquins. All the more reason to combine branding.)

Notes on Design

This map replaces a previous map that showed planned expansions of Northern California rail. Short version: Those expansions were both continuing to expand and looking more and more delayed, or unlikely. It should be noted that Capitol Corridor and presumably San Joaquins trains now display maps of both services in similar styles. Amtrak maps also show Amtrak Thruway bus routes, although more important connections, such as to BART, are barely shown if at all. My favorite of the existing agency maps has to be ACE‘s, if for no other reason than the wacky pictograms. The typeface is Public Sans.

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I’ve been living in the Bay Area for 25 years, and making transit maps for 20*, and this is the first map I’ve made of Caltrain. Until recently, Caltrain was a commuter rail line, but since it’s been electrified and service has been increased to every 30 minutes or more often all day, it now more closely resembles European regional rail, or at least one of the electric, fairly frequent commuter rail lines you find around New York, Philadelphia, or Denver. Because it doesn’t just run between the suburbs and downtown, but is bookended by two major population and employment centers (OK, Silicon Valley isn’t exactly a “center,” but you know what I mean), Caltrain is also busier than most commuter rail lines, with around 65,000 riders per day pre-pandemic. Should the Peninsula be served by a BART line? No — Caltrain should just be rebranded as a BART line (and otherwise improved, of course). (* You won’t find maps that old here because the early ones were … experimental.)

Notes on Design

The reason I’ve never done a Caltrain map is that despite its simplicity, I kept overcomplicating things — I wanted to make a map based on a string diagram, or one that showed every service pattern as a separate line (like this one) or connections as lines (like this one, but less green). In the end, I realized it was enough to simply fix the agency’s current map*, a throwback to the days before the Bay Area’s other major rail operators, BART, Muni, and VTA, got modern maps. The approach I settled on, of course, is a hybrid one combining some semblance of geographical accuracy with the look and feel of a diagram. The typeface is Roboto, which Caltrain uses on its website. (* Caltrain ticket machines and on-board screens feature nice, if basic strip maps.)

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Chicago may no longer be America’s Second City when it comes to population or economic or political power, but it remains the second-greatest urban center in the country — and its famed “L” is still the nation’s number-two rapid transit system.* (* For awhile, the D.C. Metro had higher ridership, but Chicago has made strides lately, while Washington has taken a step back. In terms of history and character, meanwhile, only Boston’s “T” can compete for second place.)

Notes on Design

I’ve always found the official L map a bit basic, to be honest. Yet the concept has always worked for Chicago. The city’s street grid is so widely understood and relied upon, the L’s platform signs have always included coordinates. Similarly, L maps have been more geographic than diagrammatic, so that stations can be located near their coordinates (this also allows stations on different lines named for the same cross street to more or less line up — there are, count ’em, five “Western” stations). This has required the Loop to be shown in an inset, and in most cities, it would result in a messy map — but in Chicago the map looks a lot like a diagram, with its straight lines and right angles. This map (or diagram?) is based on the current L map, only the execution is (hopefully) a bit cleaner and more modern. The typeface, of course, is Helvetica (specifically its latest iteration, Helvetica Now).

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Edmonton, Alberta, Canada is a metropolitan area of around a million-and-a-half people, about the same size as Oklahoma City. Yet in the late-’70s it built the first modern light rail line in North America. Like most of those who followed, it re-used an old railroad right-of-way, but it also tunneled downtown, like a German stadtbahn. The system now has more than 110,000 daily riders, more than Dallas or Denver. But Edmonton is just getting started: Until recently just 15 miles with 18 stations, the system will be nearly tripled in size by recently completed, under construction and planned expansions. And it’s going in new directions: While the original system was largely built to rapid transit standards, with off-street rights-of-way and high-platform stations, some more than a mile apart, new lines will feature low-floor trams with street-level stops.

Notes on Design

While Edmonton transit overachieves, and while the City’s branding is modern and attractive, transit operator ETS’s graphic standards are a bit basic. This strip map is the agency’s only LRT map. This map uses the City’s typeface, Prelo.

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VIA Rail is the Amtrak of Canada (or, I guess you could say, Amtrak is America’s VIA Rail). Most service is in a single urbanized corridor — the Quebec City-Windsor corridor, aka “The Corridor,” instead of the Northeast Corridor — while much of the rest consists of long-distance routes, some famous for their scenery, such as the Canadian between Toronto and Vancouver. VIA Rail is a bit different in that it still operates a few lifeline routes to isolated areas, including service to roadless outposts like Churchill, Manitoba, on Hudson Bay. Trains will also pick up and drop off passengers between stations in remote areas with advance notice. Sadly, VIA Rail is like Amtrak in that its route network has been greatly reduced over the years.

Notes on Design

Any amateur mapmaker will tell you that one of the joys of cartography as a hobby is that you can virtually explore faraway places — through research, then again through the act of drawing. I may never visit Churchill — a place where polar bears wander the streets — or even Halifax, Nova Scotia, a city of 400,000 that still feels impossibly far away. But one can dream. As for this design: Like most of my maps of late, it combines elements of geographically accurate maps and schematic diagrams, and it uses VIA Rail colors and Maax, the non-custom version of VIA’s house typeface, ViaMaax.

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Today’s trans-San Francisco Bay transit network is, in many ways, a shadow of what it once was. For over a century, from not long after the Gold Rush until just after World War II, a dense network of ferries and, later, interurban streetcars criss-crossed the bay. In the 2020s, we have fewer and smaller ferries, and fewer rail lines, although those trains — BART — are bigger, faster and go farther inland (with one notable exception). We also have express buses descended from the old streetcar routes, although they mostly run only during rush hours, and there are fewer of them now than even a few years ago, before people largely stopped commuting (RIP B Trestle Glen).

Notes on Design

This map is obviously highly stylized, and arguably a bit hard to make out. The choice is intentional: In our world of customizable map apps, the primary purpose of a static, standalone transit map is no longer to give directions. It is to raise awareness of transit options by demystifying complex systems. For details, one can always turn to one’s phone. The typeface is Kievit.

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This poster was inspired by Hamish Smyth’s and Alex Daly’s NYC Subway poster. BART’s station signage is less colorful than New York’s, although in practice BART platform signs include wayfinding icons, if not indicators of which lines serve the station.

Notes on Design

The typeface is BART’s official font, Frutiger (specifically 65 Bold). This poster is ready to print at 18×24″.

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The idea of a rail line serving the series of cities on Colorado’s Front Range has been around for years, but lately it has finally gotten traction. It’s about time: Colorado only continues to grow, and there are now close to 5 million people at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in a relatively narrow corridor less than 180 miles long. Everything from high-speed rail to Hyperloop has been considered, although conventional, low-speed diesel rail (like that in neighboring Utah and New Mexico) operated by Amtrak is now moving forward. (There’s also a proposal to connect Amtrak’s Southwest Chief to the corridor’s south end.) This plan would also finally enable passenger rail on the freight tracks between Denver and Boulder, the last great missing piece of Denver’s FasTracks plan, although to truly complete the plan, overlay local service with interim stops would be required.

Notes on Design

This strip map is based on the Front Range Passenger Rail brand, and includes symbols with a connection to Colorado and the Front Range, namely diamonds and mountains on the western horizon (including the three most prominent peaks visible from the Front Range, Pikes Peak, Mount Blue Sky, and Longs Peak). The typeface is Montserrat.

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For nearly a century after the Gold Rush, the only way across San Francisco Bay was by boat. East Bay trains (including trains on the Transcontinental Railroad) unloaded passengers onto San Francisco ferries at the ends of earthen piers, or “moles,” extending as far as two miles into the Bay. Later there were giant auto ferries similar to those on Puget Sound today, and San Francisco’s grand Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street was the second-busiest transit hub on Earth, after London’s Charing Cross Station. Then the bridges came — the Bay Bridge in 1936, and the Golden Gate the following year — and business dried up. Only recently — starting with the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989, when the Bay Bridge was unavailable for a month, but accelerating in the 21st Century — have commuter ferries staged a comeback, as the newly formed San Francisco Bay Ferry has taken over existing East Bay routes and started up new ones, with more planned.

Notes on Design

Historically, most ferry maps have looked like airline maps, with realistic geography and arcing lines. Maybe it was something about soaring across open skies, or sailing across open water. Lately, though, more have taken a diagrammatic approach, like urban rail maps — see New York, Sydney and Oslo, as well as MTC-designed maps at the Ferry Building and SF Bay Ferry’s future map. The typeface here is Erik Spiekermann‘s Fira Sans.

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Two things Scandinavians are good at: design and transit (see Oslo‘s and Stockholm‘s transit maps). And Norway’s second city is no exception, despite its diminutive size (fewer than 300,000 people in the city, and maybe a half-million in the metro area). Transit agency Skyss has both stylish branding and maps as well as an extensive network. But there’s one weird hole: Despite having a modern light rail system, its only light rail map is a basic strip map.

Notes on Design

This map is based on the Skyss suite of maps (including this awesome system map), with a few tweaks. The typeface is Galaxie Polaris.

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LOSSAN is the Northeast Corridor of the West Coast, served by Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner and long-distance trains to Seattle, Chicago and New Orleans as well as L.A. and San Diego-area commuter rail. The Surfliner, which runs the length of the corridor from the Central Coast through L.A. to San Diego (350 miles, which takes eight-and-a-half to nine hours — this is not high-speed rail), is Amtrak’s third-busiest line after the Northeast Regional and Acela. It is also one of its most scenic.

Notes on Design

With the notable exception of Cameron Booth’s Amtrak map, stylized diagrams of Amtrak lines are strangely hard to find. Metrolink, meanwhile, is the rare commuter rail system with a stylish diagrammatic map. This map is the color of sand; the typeface is Adrian Frutiger’s Avenir Next, an update of the font used by the French national rail operator, SNCF (as well as Apple Maps and Dwell magazine).

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Japan’s Shinkansen high-speed rail network is the greatest train system ever invented by humans. The Germans are competent engineers, but chose to incrementally upgrade rather than replace their national rail network. The French? They’ve won a few races (and in fairness, it’s hard to beat a train ride across the French countryside). The Chinese? Japanese technology — enough said. And the Americans? Let’s not go there. Shinkansen is the model: Its Tokaido Line between Tokyo and Osaka has saved travelers so much time over its 50 years, and made so much money, that operator JR Central is now investing $52 billion in the first (Tokyo-to-Nagoya) phase of a next-generation maglev upgrade of the corridor that will have an average speed of 265 miles per hour. Extensions of the existing “conventional” 150-200 mph Shinkansen network, meanwhile, are plowing ahead, with one line looping from Tokyo and Nagano along the Sea of Japan toward Kyoto and Osaka and another continuing north as far as Sapporo. Shinkansen’s only limitation?  A lack of English-language information. (Note: This map is now out of date, as the first phase of the Nagasaki line and the extension to Tsuruga have now opened, the extension to Sapporo has been delayed until some time after 2030, and the Chuo Maglev has been delayed to 2034.)

Notes on Design

Shinkansen can be difficult to decipher for non-Japanese speakers. This is partly because foreign-language information is limited, but also because ever since the breakup of Japanese National Railways in the ‘80s, Shinkansen has been operated by several different private companies. Shinkansen lines are also not the same thing as Shinkansen “trains,” or services: There are several trains on each line (e.g., local, limited and express), and some run on two lines. Nor do the same trains always make the same stops. This “map,” obviously, is two maps: one a typical geographical intercity rail map showing where trains go, and the other a diagram providing more specific information on how to get there. The typeface is Myriad Condensed.

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After not one but two public votes in the early 21st Century to invest in new rail and bus rapid transit lines, and with officials pushing to open several new lines before the 2028 Olympics, the mythical capital of Autopia, Southern California, is slowly but surely working toward the sort of metropolitan transportation system every great city should have — one that offers everyone freedom of movement, reliably and at low cost, without submerging coastal cities like L.A. (It hasn’t been without criticism: Some transit advocates think L.A. should spend less on rail and more on buses, or that it’s most important that buses and trains be free to ride.) An old map of mine, drafted around the 2016 election, showed all planned lines. As plans evolved, I eventually gave up on updates — but that map and the one below, which I continue to update, are steadily growing closer together.

Notes on Design

Metro’s official map is stylish, but cuts unnecessary corners on geography. It also doesn’t show Metrolink, which has plans to evolve from a traditional commuter rail network into a more frequent and modern regional rail system. In addition to most of L.A. County, this map shows the northern, more urban part of Orange County. The typefaces are DIN and Scala Sans, Metro’s official fonts.

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Depending on who you ask, California’s bullet train project is either going nowhere or making real headway. This much is certain: The map below, based on the last High-Speed Rail Authority Business Plan to project a date for completion of “phase one” — San Francisco to Orange County, via Los Angeles — is now a reminder of a more optimistic time. I’m leaving it here because the Bakersfield-Merced starter segment, at least, should be completed in a few years.

Notes on Design

The geometry of the CAHSR system is naturally conducive to a strip map. And while I’m not sure what the official High-Speed Rail Authority typeface is, it’s something similar to Futura, the font that’s used here.

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Like beauty, bus rapid transit is in the eye of the beholder. Elements of BRT can be found all over the Bay Area, and some have existed for decades; San Francisco’s Market Street, with its center bus lanes, prepaid boarding and frequent service, is arguably one of the busiest busways in North America. AC Transit’s Tempo, however, is by most accounts the region’s first full BRT line — center transit lanes span East Oakland, while much of the rest is more conventional side-running bus lanes. It features stations with level platforms and left-side boarding, a standard feature of trains that is rarely seen on buses. One thing it lacks, unfortunately, is physical separation from traffic.

Notes on Design

While Tempo’s bus wraps are busy to a fault, the official map is so minimalist, it looks like it could’ve been designed in PowerPoint (newer strip maps on buses and at stations are slightly more detailed, and multilingual — something this map could use). The brand, however, nicely lends itself to white and black versions. The typeface is Frutiger Condensed.

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For awhile, after voter approval in 2004 of billions of dollars in rail and bus rapid transit lines radiating from downtown in every direction, it looked like Denver, Colorado might be a model for other mid-sized American cities looking to modernize their transportation systems. It didn’t quite turn out that way. Costs rose, timelines lagged, and in the end parts of the plan were delayed to infinity. The plan also turned out to be fundamentally flawed in key ways; Colorado’s busiest transit corridor, left out of the plan, is still waiting for a BRT route. But all is not lost: Metro Denver was left with a framework of fast, reliable, high-capacity transit lines that will reinforce the centrality of the region’s transit-oriented core for decades to come — and a fast-growing region now has loads of opportunity sites for transit-oriented development.

Notes on Design

RTD’s official rail map used to be embarrassing. It’s now slightly better executed, if still kind of awkward. This map shows downtown shuttles (a key link in the regional system, as the central hub of Union Station is on the edge of downtown) and freeway BRT service to Boulder, and it differentiates between all-day and peak-only services. The typeface is RTD’s official one, Proxima Nova.

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The New York City Subway, Washington, D.C. Metro, Boston T and Chicago El maps are effectively regional rail maps, even if they don’t show all of the rail lines in their regions. That’s because most of the transit ridership in those regions is on those systems. Here in the Bay Area, there’s BART, but there are also lots of riders on Caltrain and the Muni Metro (or at least there were, pre-pandemic), and there are a half-dozen more rail operators besides. And while BART‘s map shows non-BART lines, it’s not really a regional rail map — other lines are grayed out, in the background, and they’re so distorted it’s distracting. A region like this needs a real, integrated and comprehensive regional rail map. (Sidenote: MTC has unveiled previews of its own updated regional transit map, including express bus routes.)

Notes on Design

This has to be my fourth or fifth version of a Bay Area rail map. This latest iteration was rendered necessary by completion of the Muni Metro Central Subway, which greatly complicated the task of rendering the Downtown San Francisco rail network. Does my approach work? As opposed to, say, the approach taken by Muni itself? The latter is probably less confusing, although it requires a gap between Montgomery and Powell stations that disrupts the orderly procession of Market Street subway stations so familiar to San Franciscans. (Another sidenote: the entire Powell-Union Square/Market Street complex should’ve just been labeled “Union Square”.) The typeface is Inter, which was designed for legibility on small screens, and happens to bear a passing resemblance to Helvetica.

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Where to start with the project formerly known as Honolulu Rail Transit, now branded as Skyline? After years of delays and cost overruns, the first leg, from the western suburbs to Aloha Stadium, is finally open. That’s the good news. The bad news is, it’s not scheduled to reach the airport until 2025, and Downtown Honolulu until 2031 (you’ll also forgive me if I’m a bit skeptical about timelines at this point). Worse, the last two stations east of Civic Center — including the busy Ala Moana Center bus hub — have been delayed indefinitely. And that’s to say nothing of the original proposal, which included branches to Waikiki and the University of Hawai’i. It’s too bad: The south shore of O’ahu is a narrow corridor with hundreds of highrises and high existing bus ridership, and the concept, based on the automated light metro technology used in Vancouver and Montréal and planned for Toronto, is a good fit.

Notes on Design

As with my map for another troubled project, California High-Speed Rail, I’ve given up on updating this map. The recently updated official map also appears to borrow elements from my map, which dates to 2014. The typeface is Parisine, which is used on station signs.

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This map shows trans-San Francisco Bay rail service at its peak, just after the Bay Bridge opened, when passengers could cross the Bay without transferring to ferries and before the ability to drive across the Bay did to demand for rail what trains on the bridge did to ferries. It may be hard to believe now, but cars were once confined to the upper deck of the Bay Bridge, where there were three lanes each way; below were three lanes for trucks and two pairs of tracks. In the East Bay, the tracks split up as shown below, fanning out into Oakland, Berkeley and surrounding cities and offering much greater coverage, if not reach, than BART does today (several of AC Transit’s Transbay bus routes are direct descendants of Key System lines). On the city side, connected to the bridge by a viaduct, was the Transbay Terminal, which later became a bus terminal and which has since been replaced by a modern transit center that, one hopes, will someday become a train station.

Notes on Design

This map imagines what a modern schematic diagram of the system might look like, had it survived. The font is Eric Spiekermann’s FF Meta, which has been described as the “Helvetica of the ’90s,” but which to my eye, at least, has a more vintage vibe.

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The North Bay’s SMART is a new kind of commuter rail for Northern California, one that holds promise for similar suburban areas in North America. Diesel Multiple Unit or DMU trains like SMART’s, or better yet, the European-standard lightweight railcars used by eBART (as well as Sprinter in North San Diego County) might be thought of as “diesel light rail,” a relatively inexpensive way to introduce medium-capacity passenger rail to existing rights-of-way in corridors with moderate transit demand. SMART is also one of the most beautiful rail lines in North America, running as it does through the rolling green hills of the North Bay, and it serves the series of historic downtowns that grew up around depots on the old Northwestern Pacific Railroad.

Notes on Design

This map is based on the official SMART map, a map that is practically begging to be streamlined. The typeface is Proxima Nova, which is used on the SMART website.

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This is one of the first maps I ever produced; hence the low resolution and lack of a PDF option. I’ve included it here not so much due to its aesthetic quality (or lack thereof), but for posterity’s sake, as a reminder of just how much could’ve been lost. Modern NIMBYs have overlearned this lesson: The Jane Jacobs generation had a sense of the common good, not just shared interests, and didn’t reflexively oppose any deviation from the status quo. Still — look at that! I have lived in not one or two but three apartments that either would’ve been destroyed by freeways or would’ve been rendered more or less uninhabitable by them. (Note that Doyle Drive — #3 below — has since been replaced by the more modern Presidio Parkway, which more or less follows the same alignment.)

Notes on Design

The typefaces are Gill Sans and Arial (as I said: one of the first maps I ever produced). I do still like the 45-degree view rotated to align with Market Street, which was inspired by this map of the 1948 Trafficways Plan.