@TheRatmeister, your map looks fantastic. I also encourage you to submit it to the T!
Philosophically, what is your thinking about the level of detail on coast lines and park borders? (I believe you mentioned this is an area that is WIP.)
Gonna selectively reply to a couple of points that I believe I can respond to quickly:
Another more drastic modification that aligns better with geography:
I'm most intrigued by this iteration. The idea of an "axis shift" creating an implicit zone demaraction running from Forest Hills to Ashmont seems very interesting. There will be at least one spacing issue I can see already -- I am pretty sure the Mattapan Line labels won't fit in the space you sketched. But that could be addressed by turning the Fairmount Line further north and having the Mattapan Line briefly run alongside it, or could potentially be addressed with a more aggressive repositioning of the Ashmont Branch and the 23.
The 15 and 16 don't meet at Kane Sq, that's almost than half a mile away. Annoyingly, they meet at the actual Uphams Corner which makes it rather hard to label.
Yup, that was a wishful-thinking-based mistake on my part. I'll probably use the same approach that I did for the 47 at Comm Ave -- I'll move the 16 closer and just leave the dashed line without an explicit label for the 16.
Why do Oak Sq and Brighton center get dots, while no other non-interchange/non-terminus bus stops do? The only reason I can think of is that they had streetcar service for 16 years longer than most other places more than 50 years ago, and I wouldn't really consider that a great reason.
Experimentation, first and foremost -- I wanted to see how it would look. To some extent, yes, I was thinking about the legacy of the A Line. That being said, Oak Sq and Brighton Center don't seem particularly different in prominence than many of the other labeled dots; if we think of dots as "prominent stops" first and "coincidentally transfer points" second, it would make sense. But I do see the point you're making. (I wanted to include some sort of stop on the 39 for the same reason, but wasn't sure I could fit in the bus label without making it crowded. Looking now, though, I think it would be fine.)
Having all of the possible CR destinations and some through stops listed makes the map rather cluttered. The Providence/Stoughton one is particularly egregious. I'd probably cut some of the less notable through stops, such as Norwood, East/South Weymouth, Taunton, Canton Center, Attleboro and Wellesley
I agree, lamentably. I dislike showing the name of the line in lieu of the places it serves. Norwood, Attleboro, Taunton, Brockton, these are all significant regional cities, and it seems worth highlighting that you can get to them on the commuter rail. (Canton Ctr and the Weymouths I feel less strongly about -- my inclination toward parallelism had me saying, "Well, every other line gets a
via, so I need to think of something for these!") But it does look very busy.
I'd probably sort the lines into groups and then semi-arbitrarily color them from there. The groups I think I would make would be something along the lines of:
- Crosstown routes (1, 47, 66), if we're doing thicker ones I think these should be the ones that get it (Bus yellow or official brown)
- Nubian-centric routes (15, 23, 28) (Orange)
- Harvard/Cambridge routes (70, 71, 73, 77, 96, 101, maybe 109) (Red)
- Forest Hills routes (31, 32, 35/36) (Purple)
- Downtown/Southie routes (7, 8, 9, 12) (Also Red, possibility a different shade?)
- Chelsea/Everett routes (104, 109, 110, 111, 116) (Blue)
- Former GL branches (57, 39) (Green)
I'd summarize this approach as "color coding by outer hub" or "color coding by region of origin", and was an approach I experimented with very very early on (years ago at this point). For the most part, I found that it doesn't impart any new information, and so just creates more noise. The "region of origin" is already encoded directly by the visual placement of the lines on the map. Color-coding by "inner hub" is an effort to differentiate routes within the same region. Is it a successful effort? Ehn, that's debatable. But that at least is the intention.
Reading this discussion has led me remember a precept I know I've voiced before: the accuracy of a map should reflect the expectations created by the complexity of the network and the geography. That is to say: a simple map can be fairly distorted and serve its purpose, while a complicated map ends up having to be pretty close to geographically accurate in order to avoid being misleading.
This is a really great point, which I wholeheartedly agree with (and have previously tried to embrace), and which my evolving design has likely lost track of. It's like saying, "My cat weighs 8.0000000 pounds" -- including that many zeros implies that I know my cat's weight with exceptional precision. Likewise, at a certain point, a diagram contains enough detail that it implies that
all dimensions are depicted with equal detail and precision.
^^ This was why my earlier iterations of this map last year tried to embrace a starker contrast between a semi-accurate map in the inner zone and an obviously-simplified diagram in the outer zone. I still think I never really succeeded with that, unfortunately.
Franklin Park is, to put it mildly, a giant pain in the ass to draw. Balancing the geographical accuracy of the shape of the park with the straight lines of the bus routes is extremely difficult. No doubt there will be several further iterations of it.
FWIW, Franklin Park is big enough IRL that I think you could get away with drawing it "oversized" on the map. (EDIT: Oooh interesting, you've consolidated the 31 and the 16. Was this intentional? The downside is that it implies a 31 <> 22 transfer, which really isn't available.) The bus routes already form most of the boundaries of the park, so I feel like you can get away with the more diagrammatic approach because the park will be defined intrinsically in terms of the bus routes.
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