The Official MBTA System Map

jbray said:
@Riverside, Looks like you need more friends at the Globe to get this kind of exposure.
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Hahaha I'm quite happy to let Andy get the exposure on this one. His map was great, plus he's a professional urban planner, and I do this decidedly unprofessionally (erm, non-professionally?) -- hopefully it helps him to get his name out there!
 
All the maps shown should have a required disclaimer:

All transit options shown are hypothetical. Actual performance will vary, and may result in terminal losses.
Expert level experience with emergency exit deployment, fire fighting and swimming are highly recommended for all riders.
Thank you for imagining you are going to ride the T.
 
Today's blog post attempts to chronicle and illustrate the storied history of the Atlantic Avenue El's service patterns during a lively period from 1919 to 1924. I made a bunch of maps for this post, trying to find some way to make sense of the details presented in the Wikipedia article on the topic (carefully researched by another member here at ArchBoston, to whom I'm indebted).

I wanted to use a diagram that was simple enough to understand, but still provided visual and attentional space to highlight the changes over this 5 years period. What I came up with is a bit of a hybrid of today's map and the Cambridge Seven Associates spider map, using the layout of the former (truncating the western edge significantly) with the visual language of the latter.

Here's a gif showing the evolution of the network (of course with anachronistic colors); thin lines are usually surface streetcars (though are sometimes used to indicate part-time/lower-freq subway services), dashed lines are the foreign streetcars, and the teal line to the east is the Boston, Revere Beach, & Lynn Railroad and ferry -- which I argue is an integral part to understanding why the Atlantic Ave El was built in the first place.

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Riverside said:
I'd mentioned the name "Chinatown Gate" for the new SL4 stop at Kneeland St, and it looks like someone at the T had a similar idea! So I've updated my diagram. I've also added some commentary on my blog, because of course I have a thousands words' worth of things to say about it. (*insert self-deprecating facepalm*)

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I love the map. The one thing that could be removed are the "walking diversions" shown as a black dashed line. They could be mistaken as free transfers or a pedestrian tunnel.
 
Charlie_mta said:
I love the map. The one thing that could be removed are the "walking diversions" shown as a black dashed line. They could be mistaken as free transfers or a pedestrian tunnel.
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Riverside can of course answer this definitively, but from my read those are showing how to 'access' stations that were closed during the Orange Line shutdown, which otherwise had no service whatsoever for that period.
 
Charlie_mta said:
I love the map. The one thing that could be removed are the "walking diversions" shown as a black dashed line. They could be mistaken as free transfers or a pedestrian tunnel.
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Brattle Loop said:
Riverside can of course answer this definitively, but from my read those are showing how to 'access' stations that were closed during the Orange Line shutdown, which otherwise had no service whatsoever for that period.
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Thanks @Charlie_mta, I'm glad you liked it! Yes, @Brattle Loop, the intention was to indicate walkable alternatives to closed Orange Line stations. IIRC, because the shuttle buses were free, the dashed lines could indeed indicate "free" transfers, but that's really just a technicality. Under normal circumstances, I think the visual language of the dashed line is too strong and creates risk of confusion, as you've laid out.

That said, I do think the official diagram ought to show some indication of walkable transfers. As I put it in my post,
These transfers would not be suitable for everyone — and it should be noted that they are not free transfers under the current model — but if you are able-bodied and have a monthly pass that doesn’t charge per ride, these transfers are useful, speedy, and potentially can relieve congestion on key sections of the network.
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My list of walking transfers to indicate:
  • State – Downtown Crossing
  • Government Center – Park
  • Boylston – Chinatown
  • Copley – Back Bay
  • Symphony – Mass Ave
  • Northeastern – Ruggles
  • Riverway – Brookline Village
  • Reservoir – Cleveland Circle – Chestnut Hill Ave
  • Kenmore – Lansdowne
  • Blue Hill Ave – Mattapan
  • Fairmount – Hyde Park
 
Riverside said:
Thanks @Charlie_mta, I'm glad you liked it! Yes, @Brattle Loop, the intention was to indicate walkable alternatives to closed Orange Line stations. IIRC, because the shuttle buses were free, the dashed lines could indeed indicate "free" transfers, but that's really just a technicality. Under normal circumstances, I think the visual language of the dashed line is too strong and creates risk of confusion, as you've laid out.

That said, I do think the official diagram ought to show some indication of walkable transfers. As I put it in my post,


My list of walking transfers to indicate:
  • State – Downtown Crossing
  • Government Center – Park
  • Boylston – Chinatown
  • Copley – Back Bay
  • Symphony – Mass Ave
  • Northeastern – Ruggles
  • Riverway – Brookline Village
  • Reservoir – Cleveland Circle – Chestnut Hill Ave
  • Kenmore – Lansdowne
  • Blue Hill Ave – Mattapan
  • Fairmount – Hyde Park
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This discussion also points out that walkable transfers should be free in a logical fare system. Having riders use the walk-transfers enhances the overall network and should be encouraged.
 
Why does every map mess up the 77? Both this map and the official map have the 77 completely incorrectly located, but in different ways. And I’m not just talking about the distortion necessary for a mass transit diagram.
 
Don't get me started about drawing the 111 bus through Charlestown, like as if it actually serves the neighborhood at all.
 
Yeah, this is very much designed by someone who doesn't really understand what the flaws are in the official map. A lot of the same appear here - the 77 as mentioned above, the 32 on the wrong side of the tracks, the 66 not running along Huntington, the 1 doing weird things in Cambridge, no water shown near Revere Beach, etc. It also introduces some new errors: missing one of the Terminal B stops and part of the SL4 loop, the 1 crossing the Fairmount Line, Aquarium straight up in the harbor, the Fitchburg Line away from Union Square, the walk line from Ruggles dead-ending between stops.

My biggest complaint is the same as the official map: there's so much distortion of real geometry, and it's applied unevenly. Yes, distortion is necessary to fit both a crowded downtown and less dense suburbs on a single map. But the proper way to apply that is radially: places that are equal distance from the center should be at approximately the same scale. That means that radial lines will be approximately straight, and circumferential lines approximately circular. The WMATA map, for all its flaws, is a pretty good example of this. The Beltway is a consistent distance from downtown, there are longer gaps between stations in some places to match reality, and important deviations from straight lines (like the curves at Tenleytown and Southern Avenue) are intentionally shown.


On the MBTA map, this means that the Green Line should be completely straight from Boylston to Cleveland Circle. Riverside and Braintree should be further out than the other rapid transit terminals. The Red Line needs to go west with long stop spacing between Charles and Harvard, then north to Davis. Bus routes need to be designed in from the beginning, and not be twisted afterthoughts.
 
Alrighty. Tossing this draft out into the ether, obviously still a WIP but I am intrigued to see how far I can develop it.

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Riverside said:
Alrighty. Tossing this draft out into the ether, obviously still a WIP but I am intrigued to see how far I can develop it.
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Throw in some green to indicate a couple of the bigger parks, maybe add icons for a few of the major landmarks, and you've got the makings of a pretty decent geographic map that would work at least reasonably well as a schematic map. Obviously there's a limit to how far you can take this, because it'd be unreadably small if it included the CR system. (I'm still not sold on the necessity of including geographic elements in the system map, but the T does it, and this one's done well, as opposed to the official map's creative liberties with the distances between certain GL branch stops...)
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
Why are all the ends of the lines cut off?
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So that’s part of the concept I’m playing around with. The big challenge with the current system map (and, in a different way, the Cambridge Seven spider map before it) is the balance of simple diagram vs geographic fidelity — particularly in that it’s hard to tell on the current map which parts have been simplified and which parts have fidelity.

The current diagram also suffers from having the Key Bus Routes grafted on in ways that are inelegant and confusing; likewise, the current diagram also loses key information about potential walking transfers. (These problems interact as well; the current diagram’s wide spacing between Copley and Back Bay makes the 39 appear to do a bizarre reverse branch at its inbound terminals. If Back Bay and Copley were shown closely enough to indicate a walking transfer, it would be much easier to unobtrusively illustrate the 39’s service of both stations.)

It occurred to me earlier today that the parts of the map that are most severely in need of geographic fidelity are those within a broadly defined "Urban Ring Corridor" -- basically everything inside of Airport - Sullivan - Harvard - Kenmore - Brookline Village - Ruggles - Andrew. It's within this zone that there are direct connections between lines, walking transfers that rely on visual proximity to diagram correctly, and where the network topology is complicated enough to require a diagram to illustrate.

Outside of that zone, the current diagram really is just a list of stations on each line and branch. (We don't even show the transfer at Reservoir/Cleveland Circle.) And this holds true for most of the Key Bus Routes, as well -- outside of the inner zone, all you really get out of the current diagram is, for example "111 goes to Woodlawn via Bellingham Sq", or "116 & 117 both go to Wonderland via Revere Center via separate routes." That's not particularly informative, and I think that trying to display it visually (using the same language used to illustrate the 1's and the 39's criss-crossing loop-de-loops) creates a noisier, more confusing diagram.

So, the lines on this diagram I sketched out today end around the Urban Ring Corridor and feed into a list of remaining stops on that line. (Taking a cue from some old London Underground maps.) If the diagram is just going to visually list the stations anyway, why not let it literally list them and save the visual clutter for illustrating the more confusing parts of the network? And in this way, this diagram is also much clearer about which parts are geographically accurate vs simplified.

My plan is to make the station lists a bit more elaborate, including indicating transfers available at each station. I also want to experiment with adding the 15-min frequent network into this diagram (in lieu of the Key Bus Routes), hopefully with similar design language in boxes at the edges to say, e.g.:

23: to Ashmont [RL]
28: to Mattapan [RL-M]

In today's draft, I was originally opting not to write out the names of minor Green Line and Silver Line stops on the BCE and SL4/5. But I'm going to experiment with that, because I think it may actually be doable. Alternatively, I may "trim" the western boundary of the map a little bit (stretching the geography slightly) so that I can just put most/all B & C stops into an "outer box". IIRC, there is user research suggesting people do prefer to have all those stops listed out, so I do think I need to list them.

@Brattle Loop, yeah this would not be suitable for the commuter rail, and like I described above, is pretty intentionally designed to focus on the inner core of the system. That said, I do think it would be easier to visually promote the Fairmount Line into the rapid transit tier on a diagram like this than on the current diagram, where Dorchester is already crowded and noisy. (I've also been thinking about whether insets could be useful here; a simple diagram of the 15-min network in Dorchester [which is something I've wanted to do for a while now] could be added into the lower right corner, for example.

The level of geography to include is an open question. I'm not thrilled with what I've done with the water in this draft -- it is pretty sloppy and really just there to have something in this draft. (As I understand it, someone at the T [not the map designer himself] was pretty insistent on visualizing the shoreline, so I figure I might as well try to accommodate that soft requirement.) Adding green space for parks is a nice idea. I'd be wary of adding too many more items, but marking hospitals seems like a possibility, and perhaps university buildings (though I would not want to label them -- just use an H for hospital buildings and... I dunno what to do for universities).

Unrelated to any of the above, but one thing to note about this diagram: I have attempted to keep all sizing intact from the current diagram. The lines are the same thickness relative to the size of the page, as are the stop sizes, and the labels themselves have just been repositioned from the official diagram, with no resizing whatsoever. (My hope there is to manage to satisfy ADA guidelines that I know exist but with which I am unfamiliar.)
 
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