Yes, there would need to be some clever design to make it work. I'm not a designer, so I won't pretend to know the best way to accomplish it, but I think it should be considered as a goal -- how do you visually unify the feeder routes with their "parent" subway line?
That map, in my opinion, also does a significantly cleaner job with the Dorchester bus network than the current map does.
That is a good point about the mismatch between the geographic fidelity of the shorelines vs the purely diagrammatic nature of the rest of the map. That's a valid concern.
I'd never heard about the rollsigns, that's fascinating! As for the 1 and 66, I actually gave that some thought... basically they'd both be red, in my opinion. A few overlapping reasons -- most admittedly arbitrary, but I think with some consistent logic:
- I wouldn't have any of the feeder routes be Silver. Several reasons for that, but the big one is that a huge chunk of the Dorchester network would/"should" be Silver insofar as it feeds into Nubian, but the reality is that nearly all of those routes continue on to Ruggles, precisely so that they would connect to Orange. So those are really part of "an Orange Line network" rather than "a Silver Line network".
- You mention the 1 and 66, but there are several other routes that run between hubs -- e.g. the 23 and 28, or the 39. In those cases, I'd arbitrarily choose the color of the "inboundmost" hub, which ends up being a reasonable tiebreaker for most of the radial routes
- That still leaves the true crosstown routes in limbo -- the 1 and 66, the 86 and 91, the 8, and the 47. One option would be to color these routes differently altogether. However, in general I think the problem can be solved by applying two principles: 1) Try not to overload the map with too many routes of the same color, and 2) Limit the number of "color-originating hubs" as much as possible
- 1 and 66: Choice between Red and Silver (or maybe Orange) yields Red from Harvard -- a massive center of gravity on the network
- 86 and 91: Choice between Red and Orange, yields a complete coin toss; Sullivan, Harvard, and Central are all going to be major hubs with many routes originating from each. But, the map will have a lot of orange (Forest Hills, Jackson Square, Ruggles, Sullivan, Malden) so I'd tip the scale toward Red for variety
- 8: Choice between Green and Red yields Green from Kenmore -- JFK/UMass has virtually no originating routes of its own, and there's a core of routes feeding into Kenmore that run along Brookline Ave, of which the 8 would be a part
- 47: Actually is Red from both ends, so an easy solve. The 47 is ridiculous though, so if it ever were split into Central-Ruggles and Ruggles-Broadway routes, I'd say the Central route gets Red (from the Central hub) and Broadway gets Orange (from Ruggles)
I think in my head I've come up with the following "color-originating hubs":
- Red
- Alewife
- Harvard
- Central
- Kendall
- South Station
- Andrew
- Fields Corner (for routes from south)
- Ashmont (for routes from south)
- Mattapan (for routes from south)
- Quincy Center
- Orange
- Malden Center
- Wellington
- Sullivan
- Ruggles
- Jackson Square
- Forest Hills
- Blue
- Green
- Lechmere
- Haymarket (arbitrary, but recognizes the streetcar heritage of the bus routes there, in particular the "foreign cars")
- Copley (yes, the 39 should be Green, and likely also the 9 and 10)
- Kenmore
And if anyone is curious what the Key Bus Routes look like in a system like this...
View attachment 13478
(Boy it sure looks like I spend a long time thinking about these things... the scary thing is that it was the write-up that took a while! The thinking part was relatively straightforward and speedy... And the map, I'd put together previously)
