Transit Maps by CalUrbanist

BART: An Alternate History

CalUrbanist — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:08:51 +0000

There are plenty of “fantasy” or “crayon” Bay Area rail maps on the Internet. You can find subways all over San Francisco; you can find urban rail in the rural North Bay (BART to Napa!). This map tries to be a bit more realistic. Don’t get me wrong — it imagines a different postwar political and cultural reality. But its starting point is a realistic scenario, a potential turning point: What if Contra Costa County, like San Mateo County before it, had opted out of the BART District before the vote that created it? What if BART planners had gone back to the drawing board, and sketched out a new proposal focused on the densely populated core of San Francisco and Alameda counties? What if that proposal had won? And what if BART had expanded over the years by investing less in suburban park-and-rides, and more in urban neighborhoods? What if, in other words, today’s BART looked more like another Great Society subway, the Washington, D.C. Metro? There are 40 Metro stations in the District of Columbia, which has a population of about 700,000 (and, granted, armies of federal employees — or at least it did). This map has 56 stations (vs. 19 today) in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, which have a combined population of around 1.4 million (60 stations if you include Caltrain, as the map does — with, to be clear, existing Caltrain and not BART trains and tracks). That doesn’t tell the whole story; in the world of this map, most of the Muni Metro still exists. But the point is this: Isn’t this the sort of metro system the urban Bay Area should have, and could have, even given its location within California and America?

If you’ve made it this far and are still interested, click here and scroll down for more details.

Notes on Design

This map is based, obviously, on the current BART map. The typeface is Frutiger.

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Boulder, Colorado Buses

CalUrbanist — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 18:38:52 +0000

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 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 University of Colorado 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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Bay Area/Central Valley Rail

CalUrbanist — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 22:08:55 +0000

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 Gold Runner, formerly 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 Gold Runner. All the more reason to combine branding.) Note that this map shows the under-construction Oakley Station, which, sadly, will replace the existing Antioch-Pittsburg Station in the near future.

Notes on Design

This map replaces a previous map that included planned expansions of Northern California rail. Short version: Those expansions were both continuing to expand and looking more and more delayed, or unlikely. Some Amtrak maps also show Amtrak Connection (formerly Amtrak Thruway) bus routes, although more important connections, such as BART, are rarely shown. 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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Caltrain

CalUrbanist — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 22:00:51 +0000

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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Edmonton Light Rail

CalUrbanist — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 01:32:58 +0000

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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Transbay Transit

CalUrbanist — Fri, 03 Apr 2020 04:32:10 +0000

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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BART Station Signs

CalUrbanist — Sat, 23 Mar 2019 15:33:06 +0000

This poster was inspired by Hamish Smyth’s and Alex Daly’s NYC Subway poster. BART’s current station name signs include wayfinding icons, but not shields for lines serving the station, which I’ve added here. Some BART signs are also non-standard, and often times, BART can’t even figure out what to call its own stations — the BART map, online list of stations and platform signage may render up to four different names, if you include the original station identifiers that were never removed. Here I’ve tried to use complete names rather that the shorter versions on many station signs, although I just couldn’t bring myself to add “St” to Montgomery and Powell (most style guides do that for numbered streets, but it’s not “Ashby Ave,” is it?).

Notes on Design

The typeface is BART’s official font, Frutiger (specifically 65 Bold). This poster is ready to print at 11×14″.

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Colorado Connector

CalUrbanist — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 18:41:11 +0000

The idea of an inter-city/commuter rail line serving the fast-growing cities lined up along Colorado’s Front Range urban corridor has been around for decades, but lately it’s finally gotten traction. It’s about time: There are now around 5 million people at the foot of the Rockies in a relatively narrow strip less than 180 miles long. Technologies from high-speed rail to Hyperloop have been considered, although conventional diesel rail (like in neighboring Utah and New Mexico) is now moving forward, if in stages. This plan would also finally allow passenger rail between Denver, Boulder and Longmont, the last great missing piece of Denver’s FasTracks plan. (The State also appears to be serious about a new line on existing tracks in the northern mountains, and there’s a proposal to connect the Front Range corridor’s south end to the Amtrak Southwest Chief.)

Notes on Design

This strip map is based on the Colorado Connector brand (or “CoCo,” as the Front Range Passenger Rail District likes to call it). It also, however, adds some Colorado-specific elements, including a stylized diagram of the actual Front Range of the Rocky Mountains (the official CoCo map sorta, kinda does this) and diamond-shaped stations. It also leaves potential future expansions to the official map. A couple of notes on the CoCo brand: The fox is cute, and you can’t go wrong with western sunset colors (which also happen to be Broncos and Rockies colors). But both the logo, with its rounded font, and the map, with its cartoonish vibe, feel very much of the moment, which is not necessarily a good thing. The best transit brands are timeless — both BART and Muni have had the same logos for 50 years. The typeface is Quicksand, per the CoCo brand (the logo is Frankfurter).

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San Francisco Bay Ferries

CalUrbanist — Tue, 15 May 2018 04:29:37 +0000

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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Bergen, Norway Light Rail

CalUrbanist — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 14:23:49 +0000

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 Corridor

CalUrbanist — Sat, 18 Mar 2017 20:55:46 +0000

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 Shinkansen

CalUrbanist — Sun, 03 May 2015 01:55:35 +0000

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 Chuo Maglev has been delayed to 2034, and the extension to Sapporo has been delayed until 2039.)

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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