Davis, California. The basic point of the Tube-style diagram is to simplify everything down to its most basic: how do I get from point A to point B? This includes drawing maps of places like Davis, a small college town in California with a small bus system operated by the college’s students.
New York Subway. This is my suggestion for what to do with the New York subway map. The current MTA map simultaneously gives too much information (i.e., the street grid) and too little, because the map provides no service information.
The East Bay 2030. The second of three detailed maps of my brilliant plan to revolutionize how the Bay Area gets around.
How not to design a diagram. This thing fails miserably at answering the one question it’s designed to answer: “Where can I fly on Frontier Airlines?” It gives you lots of information that doesn’t matter (geography) and displays the important information (what routes they fly) poorly. Just try figuring out whether you can fly from Denver to Columbus non-stop. I dare you.
Los Angeles 2020. Since my last map of Los Angeles was posted, LA Mayor Villaraigosa and the Los Angeles MTA have decided to accelerate their subway construction timetable. A lot. For comparison, this is what the system looks like now. By 2020, LA should have the second-largest subway system in the U.S., after New York.
San Francisco Bay Area 2030. The companion rapid transit diagram of the Bay Area, matching my map of the City of San Francisco.
City of San Francisco 2030. This map is the outgrowth of a college project to design a proper mass transit system for the Bay Area.
Greater New York. New York has no fewer than four different commuter rail agencies, none of which is willing to share maps.
Detroit. This map that I produced for the City of Detroit’s light-rail project. Phase I is projected to open 2011; Phase II is slated for 2013.
Bay Area 2009. With the BART system cut down to half-size, the Southern Pacific commuter trains survived into the modern day as the CalTrain commuter service. Soon, CalTrain will be upgraded into a four-track rapid transit line, and Marin is getting its own commuter service, SMART. 50 years late, but better late than never.
BART 1961 Plan. One of the little-known things about the original BART system is that it was only half-built. In the early 1960s, San Mateo and Marin both pulled out of the BART district: Marin because the Golden Gate Bridge directors didn’t think the Bridge would carry a pair of tracks, and San Mateo because local merchants were afraid of losing shoppers to San Francisco.
The future of suburbia. Suburbia’s Achilles’ heel is its auto-dependency. Curing it in the long term will require a major reworking of the modern suburb, but this long-term fix simply isn’t feasible in the short run. What can be done, however, is to redesign the suburbs to accommodate bicycles.
New Orleans 2020. New Orleans was a gigantic clusterfuck even before it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. That said, it has two big advantages: first, it’s the major port in and out of the Midwest. Second, it has a famous if underperforming mass transit system. A few short streetcar extensions and a modernized network would work wonders. (NOLA cars stop every two blocks and run at 10 miles an hour.)
California High-Speed Rail. Now that Prop. 1A passed, we’re likely to have an LA-SF bullet train by 2016, give or take a few years. (The brown line in the corner is the Desert XPress, a privately funded high speed rail line that just had its draft environmental impact statement approved.)
