I did a poll, and based on the poll, I drew a map. It’s basically the same design language as the Santa Barbara map because it just worked out that way.
This is basically a reward for completing regionalbahn maps for every Canadian province. Now all I have to do are the plains/mountain states, and some of the Deep South. Once I’m done with all of them they’ll have their own separate page on here.
Here’s a strip map of part of Seattle’s old interurban network from up to Everett (here cut back to Lynnwood for Linkular reasons) and down to Tacoma in a post-ST3 era. (The line to Renton runs with the light rail up to Ballard.) I may or may not draw the whole network later.
Short notes on the design language: I was impressed with Sound Transit’s [frustratingly inconsistent] use of Akzidenz Grotesk in its original press release for their new line numbering system, and I wished they’d used the font more extensively, and then I recalled Steve Boland’s strip map of the mid-2020s Link system, which uses AG exclusively in a way that made it seem modern instead of retro, and I decided I wanted in on that. Also I yoinked the colored-bars-on-top-and-bottom bullet design from the RATP, obviously, because I thought it looked cool.
Here’s a crayon map of Cincinnati, showing possible service patterns if the city interurbans were fed into the subway loop…and, of course, if the subway loop was actually finished. In addition to the usual suspects like the Rand McNally 1924 atlas, primary sources were these two Jake Berman maps, these streetcar maps of Cincy, Dayton, and northern Kentucky, and these Ohio interurban timetables.
I do, however, want to point out that from a modern perspective, accounting for the way inner Cincinnati has developed in the intervening century, if the subway was finished in the 1920s as originally intended it would have met the same fate as the one in Rochester. It was originally intended to feed streetcars and interurbans, and would have seen little use once those were abandoned or bustituted (considering the branch headways would stink anyway), and the route of the subway bypasses quite a few major attractions and employment centers like the University of Cincinnati, the hospitals, the zoo, and the Hall of Justice. Also a loop where one end is in the city center is just a dumb idea in general. Best case scenario for the subway looks like what they have in Pittsburgh where one or two rump lines are preserved but barely enough for it to be the wildly successful backbone of anything.
If you wanted to build a subway for the Cincinnati of today it would look more like a Soviet triangle or even some of its later LRT plans than anything else.
I’ve recently restarted this big project I’ve been intermittently working on where I crayon out a regionalbahn network for every US state, and just recently I finally managed to figure out what I wanted to do with the Huntington WV / Ashland KY area, which because it’s split across the winding edges of three different states was more difficult than it honestly had any right to be. So this is a cute little diversion where we imagine the interurban streetcars running between Ashland and Huntington were consolidated into a Wuppertal-esque suspended monorail, following the old, surprisingly well-preserved right of way.
Finally, after five months and multiple computer issues, a new map. Thank God.
This is a map of the regional rail network for Hessen, which is the only German state that doesn’t have its own official full regional rail map. There’s one map for the Frankfurt area and one map for the Kassel area, but that’s it, and between then it’s unclear how the network in the state fully fits together. Notes:
Of course I say this map was a pain to draw and then turn around and start feverishly planning for something covering all of Switzerland once the next timetable change hits at the end of the year, so what do I know.
That’s it. Get vaccinated if you can, scream bloody murder about wealthy Western countries stockpiling vaccines if you can’t.
Happy May Day. The appropriate reaction to the US shunting our May Day off to the first Monday in September is to declare that we have two May Days. But really, every day should be May Day. Anyway.
The issues I’m having with my external hard drive are on their way to being resolved, but I still have a backlog, and also this thing where I have an interest in working on something for like…a few days, but never long enough to actually finish it. So I’m giving youse a menu. My next map is likely to be one of the following, alphabetized by city or region:
That’s about it. I may get to most of these, I may get to none of these, this is just what’s on the brain at the moment. I am also exploring options for streaming me working on these bad boys, if anyone’s interested in that, but also keep in mind that Ted’s Transit Map Stream is in the same weird endless-study limbo as Gateway in NY/NJ or the Ontario Line in Toronto, so who knows if I’ll ever get off my @$$ and make it happen for real.
Also while I have you on the horn, if you live in a state where there’s anti-trans legislation being considered, please do your trans and nonbinary friends a favor and yell and scream and [redacted, in Minecraft] all relevant elected representatives. Do whatever you need to to avoid having to say you’re sorry later, because this enby at least is getting real sick of hearing that from people.
It’s been disastrous for my mental health and the vast majority of my substantive interactions with other people happen elsewhere, so.
If you need to get in touch with me, my comment section is always open.
Finally, something I can justify a blog post about.
This one’s been on my to-do list ever since IUPUI redesigned its shuttle bus network about a year and a half ago, and it turns out the only maps they have are Google Maps overlays (good for real-time information but never a substitute for an actual map) and one illegible sketch which isn’t that useful for orientation purposes and doesn’t appear to have a high-res version anywhere. All the frequency information and such was yoinked from IUPUI’s shuttle bus website.
I had a lot of fun working on this, but drawing all the buildings in the IUPUI campus, especially the hospitals, was a nightmare. Still, it was important to me that they be there because I’m sure the unique shapes and positioning of some of these structures would help users orient themselves a bit better. It was also important to show the Red Line because that helps explain why Line 5 takes that long detour into downtown. If the people mover was still running (RIP) it’d be on here too, probably.
(I really hope that people who use the system don’t need a map showing the exact location of all the stops, because for clarity reasons I combined some of the stops where the inbound/outbound locations shared a name but were slightly offset, and didn’t show places like ICTC, Riverwalk, or BRTC where the shuttle ducks into a parking lot or loading zone to pick up passengers.)
Also I just wanna point out, for a campus located in the city center IUPUI sure does give over a disquieting proportion of its surface area to parking.
I was bored and thought I’d try to make up a font for a hypothetical countdown display for one of the crayonier rail network concepts I’ve been hashing out lately, and I liked it so much I decided to make a whole strip map out of it. So that’s the story of that.
That technically isn’t a typeface, by the way. That’s a series of small circles arranged so it looks like one. I didn’t think just using a font that mimics a pixel display would ensure everything lined up the way I wanted it to.
It was fun doing something in a style I’ve not seen very often, even though the result is still kind of a novelty.
So the roni finally killed Crossrail 2 a few months ago, which means it’s time for me to clean out a map that’s been sitting on my laptop for a while but I never actually posted for some reason. It’s called the George line because I figured the queen would be dead before this thing would open and I doubt Prince Charles is keeping his name when he becomes king.
At least Thameslink’s on the tube map now, I guess? They really need to just merge the tube map and the tube/rail map together and get it over with.
