Wednesday, June 17, 2015

California Rail Map

Alfred Twu and a team of designers made a subway-style California Rail Map. Here are a couple of screen shots - the whole thing can be seen here.


Like most subway style maps the geography is distorted, in this case to a crazy degree. The San Francisco peninsula sticks way out like a sore thumb, grotesquely swollen actually. Yes, the top of the image below is Oregon.
To fully appreciate the distortion, I made my own map of the state's shape according to Twu, et al.














Of course the implication of good transit is very overstated here. Some of these routes only run once a day and many don't run at all on the weekends. Still it's fun to imagine a car-free California.

1 comment:

Michael5000 said...

It's funny that they call it a "rail map," when so much of what it's actually showing is bus routes.