Seattle Light Rail

Along with greater Los Angeles, metropolitan Seattle has the fastest-growing rail system in the United States. This concept for an in-car strip map shows Link light rail as it should appear by the end of 2025, and as it will remain for a few years after, until the next big wave of expansion currently planned for the 2030s. The existing system consists of the 1 Line (formerly the Red Line, an interesting choice, other issues aside, for a city whose unofficial colors are blue and green) between Angle Lake and Northgate. Stride bus rapid transit is scheduled to open by the end of the decade.

NOTES ON DESIGN

This is more or less what a near-term Link strip map should look like based on current branding, assuming Sound Transit shows both lines on a single diagram, and if the agency ever lets go of its station pictograms, which only really make sense where illiteracy rates are high (a more universal way to reinforce station names is the Asian system of numbering them). The typefaces are Akzidenz-Grotesk and, for route shields, Humnst 777. As always when I post a Seattle transit map (this is my fourth or fifth), I will note that the standard in Puget Sound transit mapping remains Oran Viriyincy’s city map, now accompanied by an Eastside map.

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