Cool site for concept transit maps.

[randomness]

San Francisco Cityscape has a lot of great ideas for new transit maps, mostly for the SF Bay Area. It's a great site if you like maps and transit.

One map in particular that caught my eye was an example spider map they did for the 16th St. Mission BART station:
(click to enlarge)
It's based on a series of maps that CHK America, Inc.* produced for Transport for London. Spider maps are schematic maps of all the bus lines serving a transit hub, radiating out from a street map of that neighborhood showing where the bus stops are. It makes it easy to see exactly where to find your bus, and how many stops it is to your destination. Click on the examples to get a better idea of what I mean.

Here's an example for Piccadilly Circus:
(click for full-sized PDF)

Greater Greater Washington, a blog that often covers transit, has a post about spider maps:
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post.cgi?id=3434

I'd love to see one of these done for some of the big transit hubs around Boston, like Harvard Square, just as a proof of concept, like the one for 16th St. Mission.

*CHK America, Inc. has a number of fine examples of their work at that link. I have no connection with them except as a user of their products.

Comments

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

For some reason, the San Francisco map made me completely confused.

The Piccadilly Circus one made immediate sense to me.

I think it was because the routes in the blow-up map section were highlighted a different color than streets with no routes on them.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Most of the T stations now have a "neighborhood map" and a "bus connections map" that attempt what these spider maps are doing, but on a geographic map. They are essentially magnifications of sections of the map used in the big system map brochure. I haven't heard much feedback on them, so I'm not sure if people have found them helpful or not.

I just had a look at the ones in Harvard T station. They are helpful, particularly for someone like me who doesn't usually transit Harvard and has to look up a connection. Someone did some nice work!

Two things occur to me:

1) They do in two maps what the spider map integrates into a single map. It's as if they took the two parts of the spider map and broke them out into two maps. This is less useful because you have to go back and forth between the maps, but they are posted next to each other in the station, so that helps.

2) The one thing the London maps do, which neither the proposed San Francisco nor the Harvard maps do is to label the bus stops themselves. The Harvard neighborhood map does indicate where the bus stops are, but indicates them with single black points. One of the most useful things about the London maps are that at complex locations, they give a letter indicator both on the map and at the top of the bus stop sign itself, so when you see that the map says your bus stops at "D", you can figure out exactly where to stand.

I don't know if you've seen one of their bus stop signs, but there's an example at http://www.ukstudentlife.com/Travel/Transport/London/Buses/BusSign2.jpg (I'm vaguely frightened by the fact that the example is lettered "Z", but I just looked at the map at http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/gettingaround/maps/buses/pdf/bakerstreetandmarylebone-2010.pdf and realized that particular letter scheme is shared between two tube stops.)

It's particularly helpful when your bus is a through bus in a complex intersection, because you have to make sure you're taking the bus in the direction you want even after finding a bus stop with the right number on it. In a complicated intersection--London is full of them--your bus may not travel through the intersection in a direction that makes any sense based on its later route.

(I hope I haven't been too long-winded! I do find the T maps helpful and was hoping to give useful feedback.)