Back in January, I posted a review of the current Boston MBTA transit map on my Transit Maps blog – and I had some harsh words for it (I believe the phrase “hot mess” occurs in the text). Always one to back my words up with actions, I’ve been quietly working on my own revised version that I feel improves the map in quite a few areas. I’ve also created a few different versions to illustrate some points about the design, so hang in there: this could be a long post!

The image at the top of the post (also here on Flickr at 4000px wide) shows the same information as the current official MBTA map, with the addition of all stations on the Green Line branches, not just the accessible ones, and all stations on the Silver Line BRT. This does mean that my map is not the same square format as the current map, and I fully admit that to achieve that square format, you must to omit stations on the Green Line. However, I wanted to see what the map looked like with all stations named – so my maps are unapologetically in a wider format.

Other changes from the official map: a tweaking of all the subway line colours to slightly deeper, richer hues that seem to suit Boston better than plain old red, blue, green and orange. I felt it was especially important for the Red Line, which is red because it goes to Harvard, which has crimson as its colour.

Depiction of the Silver Line routes as thinner, separate routes that make their routing easier to follow, especially for the S4 and S5 lines around Chinatown and Boylston. Despite attempts to convince people otherwise, the Silver Line is not part of the subway system, it’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and needs to be visually differentiated from the actual subway lines.

The underlying geography is now show in a stylised, rectlinear form that matches the depiction of the routes themselves. One of my pet peeves is angular transit maps that insist on putting these routes on “real” geography. The geography always ends up totally distorted to fit the routes anyway, and I find the clash of styles very jarring.

A firm hierarchy of routes: The subway routes and the Silver Line (the most important information on the map) sit at the top, then commuter rail, then bus routes, then (least importantly), ferry routes at the bottom. If lines do not interact with each other when they cross, they are separated by a thin white keyline. The routes lines also become correspondingly thinner the lower down the information hierarchy they fall.

A complete reworking of the Green Line branches to better match their real-life layout (although in a perfect world, the “C” branch would be straight along its entire length). This also allowed me to introduce a thin dotted black line between Chestnut Hill Ave, Cleveland Circle and Reservoir stations to indicate that they are within walking distance of each other (in effect, an out-of-system transfer), which I’ve also used between Boylston and Chinatown stations.

A visual indication that the Blue Line between Government Center and Bowdoin is only open for the working week, rather than the easy to miss asterisk on the current map.

Station labels are limited to horizontal and angled 45 degrees up to the right. I normally strive to get all station names horizontal, but the Green Line branches make that impossible in this situation. It’s still an improvement on the current map, which uses more variants of angled text.

Station markers have been made as linear as possible, which I think is a great improvement over the knobbly, multi-armed markers used currently.

I’ve also fixed a few errors that I found on the official map, mainly to do with bus routes (especially the 66, and the 15, 22 and 23 which should all go through Roxbury Crossing on their way to Ruggles).

This variation (4000px version on Flickr here) shows all current routes like the first map, but omits the key bus routes. Of note is how much cleaner the map looks instantly – almost nothing else has changed at all. The other main improvement in this variant is that the labelling of the stations on the S4 and S5 lines near Dudley Square gets a lot neater because we don’t have to deal with the #1 bus route!

One thing you may have noticed with the two maps above is the new way I’ve treated the Lowell commuter rail line: running at a 45-degree angle instead of straight up like on the current map. Why have I done this? Because the map has had the future built into it – as all well-designed transit maps should. The currently-planned Green Line Extension will run along much of the same right-of-way as the Lowell Line, so I’ve moved it to a position where this can be achieved easily.

Here’s a map with the future routes added (and here on Flickr). Nothing has had to be moved; everything just slots into place perfectly.

Even better is this future map without the key bus routes (here on Flickr), which allows the new stations (Newmarket, Geneva/Four Corners, Talbot Ave and Blue Hills Ave) on the Fairmount commuter rail line to be respaced a little more evenly and aesthetically.

As always, comments and thoughts are welcome!

This part of my post elicited a very interesting comment from Chris Helenius in Finland, complete with a nice screen shot of the point he’s trying to make – that there are ways to get matching curves around a corner when using the Round Corners effect. However, the method he shows is a workaround – he expands the appearance of the curve, then offsets the path the required distance. In practice, this is very similar to my approach of keeping a “master” library of curves that I insert where needed – both require some cutting and pasting of points and curves to achieve the final result.

What Chris’ post doesn’t recognise is that Adobe’s implementation of Rounded Corners is fundamentally flawed, and it’s a flaw that makes it impossible to achieve consistent nested curves.

As the diagram above shows, the problem comes from Adobe’s poorly implemented definition of “radius” in the Rounded Corner effect’s dialog box.

The dictionary definition of radius is, “a straight line from the centre to the circumference of a circle or sphere.” And that’s what I expect to be implemented when I set a value in the dialog box – make a curve with this radius from the centre point of the inferred circle. If this were true, you’d see curves like those shown in the second column of the diagram: three nicely nested curves at a radius of 10, 20 and 30 points, which look the same regardless of the angle between the lines when you started.

Instead, you get what happens in column three. For reasons known only to itself, Illustrator measures the value that is put into the dialog box from the original corner point (shown as the black lines in column three) that joins the line segments on the intended curve, not the centre point of the circle. In other words, this is not a true radius at all.

When the angle between the line segments is 90 degrees, things work as expected, because the mathematics works out the same regardless of where the “radius” is measured from. But look what happens when there’s a 135-degree angle. Instead of the outer curve having a radius to its centre point of 30 points (as input into the dialog box), it’s actually 72.46 points! Even worse, all three curves end up having completely different centre points (as indicated by the grey intersecting lines), so no amount of fiddling with values is ever going to get them to nest inside each other properly.

As you can see, entering the same set of values into the Round Corners dialog box produces vastly different results depending upon the angle between the line segments – this makes results impossible to predict and the effect totally useless when designing a transit map: what is a nice tight 30 point radius on one part of the map may become a loose 72 point radius in another, even though you asked for a 30 point radius both times. I’ll be sticking to my labour-intensive, but 100% accurate methods.

OVERALL

Visits: 42,979
Unique Visits: 38,775 (89.53% new visitors)
Pageviews: 70,632

DEMOGRAPHICS

Top 5 Cities
The second entry here is almost entirely due to interest in my redesign of the DC Metro Map.
1. New York: 2,291 visits
2. Washington, DC: 2,037
3. Chicago: 1,139
4. San Francisco: 864
5. Portland, OR: 788

Top 5 Browsers Used
1. Chrome: 13,746 (31.98%)
2. Firefox: 12,111 (28.18%)
3. Safari: 7,338 (17.07%)
4. Internet Explorer: 5,449 (12.68%)
5. Mozilla Compatible Agent: 2,931 (6.82%)

Wow, Chrome is getting popular these days! Nice to see IE at four.

Top 5 Operating Systems
1. Windows: 22,789 (53.02%)
2. Macintosh: 14,029 (32.64%)
3. iPhone: 2,474 (5.76%)
4. iPad: 1,694 (3.94%)
5. Android: 935 (2.18%)

However, combine the three Apple products for a total of 18,197 visits (42.34%) from MacOS or iOS devices – impressive.

TOP FIVE MOST VIEWED ARTICLES

Leaving out the home page and the For Sale page (which aren’t really articles, per se), these were my five most visited articles in 2011.

5. High Speed Train Routes of France: 1,935 page views (2.74%)
4. Amtrak Subway Map: 2,897 (4.10%)
3. Washington DC Metro Diagram Redesign: 2,939 (4.16%)
2. Interstates as Subway Diagram: 2011 Version: 13,629 (19,30%)
1. U.S. Routes as a Subway Map: 20,170 (28.56%)

What makes the number 1 article’s numbers even more impressive was that it was only posted on December 17, while the number 2 article was posted in February!

TOP 5 REFERRING SITES

So where did those visitors come from? 8,598 visitors came here directly. After that, these were the top five referring sites:

5. The Huffington Post: 1,739 visits
4. Autoblog.com: 2,256
3. Reddit: 2,492
2. Laughing Squid: 2,676
1. Tumblr: 2,681

At a glance, I would say most of these referrals have to do with the U.S. Routes Subway Map project: these sites drove an insane amount of traffic my way in late December.

TOP 5 SEARCH TERMS

Internet search doesn’t drive a huge amount of traffic to the site (only 11% of total visits) – it really is word of mouth and referrals that bring people here. That said, here’s the top five keywords that people use to find me:

5. washington dc metro map: 61 visits
4. amtrak subway map: 65
3. cambooth: 118
2. (not provided) – damn you, Google!: 222
1. cameron booth: 548

Many of the other search terms are just variants of these, including people who charmingly search with “http://www.cambooth.net” as their search term – bless ‘em.

That’s it! If you joined me in 2011 – thank you! And hopefully I’ll continue to have interesting projects and ideas to post up here in 2012!

Cameron Booth
Portland, Oregon

At long last, I present the latest in my series of transit map-styled designs. This time, we have the U.S. Highway system (that’s U.S. Routes, not to be confused with the newer Interstate Highway system – which as most of you well know, I have already mapped).

I have to say that without a doubt, this is the most complex network that I have yet attempted. Not only are there far more numbered routes than in the Interstate system, but there are also historical extensions and branches of many routes to consider. In some cases, numbers that were used once were reused in different parts of the country (see U.S. 48, which has been used for three completely separate roads!). I have attempted to show these historical roads as thinner route lines “behind” the main network, including the most famous U.S. highway of all – Route 66, which gets special treatment, being solid black in colour.

Like the Interstate system, the U.S. Routes (mainly) conform to a numbered grid system. Evenly numbered highways run from west to east, with low numbers in the north (U.S. 2 is the lowest) rising to the highest numbers in the south (U.S. 98 in Florida). Numbers ending in a “0″ are considered “major” routes and are given their own unique colour on the map. Odd-numbered highways run from north to south, with low numbers to the east (U.S. 1) rising to high numbers in the west (U.S. 101 along the Pacific Coast). Numbers ending in “1″ are the “major” routes.

Interestingly, this numbering system is the mirror of the Interstate system, which numbers from I-90 in the north to I-4 in the south, and I-95 in the east to I-5 in the west. This was done intentionally to prevent the occurrence of like-numbered U.S. highways and Interstates in the same areas. It’s also why there is no I-50 or I-60, as they would cross much the same terrain as U.S. 50 and U.S. 60.

However, being an older road system, cobbled together in the mid-1920s from a scraggly collection of road trails, the U.S. highway system sticks to its grid far more loosely, with many routes starting or ending well out of their ordained position. This map has taken me well over a year to complete (between other projects) and I restarted my work on three separate occasions, each time almost convinced that this map was impossible. This last time, I started at the most complex intersection of roads on the map – Memphis, Tennessee – and solved it first. Once that resolved itself, clues were revealed as to how to approach the rest of the map and things got a lot easier. So much so, that in the end, I was even able to add some of the longer “child” three-digit routes, some of which are actually longer than their so-called “parent” route. U.S. 191 runs from Canada to Mexico, while U.S. 91 has been cut back down over the decades to a very short stretch between Idaho Falls, ID and Brigham City, UT.

Huge thanks should be given here to the ridiculously comprehensive website, usends.com, which helped me sort out the tangled web these roads make, especially with historical routes.

As always, comments and suggestions are most welcome! Head on over to Flickr, where you can view a 4000px wide version of the map.

36×24 posters now available for ordering on the For Sale page!

transitmaps.tumblr.com

This is it. My final take on a redesigned Washington, D.C. Metro Map. This is my third major revision of a project that began in February of last year, and won the People’s Choice Award in the Greater Greater Washington “Redesign the Metro Map” contest earlier this year. I’ve taken time away from this diagram to work on a few other projects recently, but the release of Lance Wyman’s draft diagram has inspired me to finish an “ultimate” version of my vision of the diagram.

This version looks quite similar to the previous two, but has been reworked to take into account comments that I received after the GGW contest, and also incorporates some successful elements from other entries in that contest, such as subtitles for lengthy station names. (Best. Idea. Ever.)

Some of the bigger changes include a thickening of the route lines, “tick” markers for stations that point towards the station’s label (to combat some criticism that it was sometimes difficult to determine which label belonged to which station in my previous versions) and a general tightening of the layout to be more compact. Type size is also increased throughout. I’ve also dropped the separate full route lines for the new peak-only services that I used in the contest: general consensus seemed to indicate this was more confusing than helpful. The peak extensions to the Yellow and Orange lines are now shown as spurs of the main line, as on Lance Wyman’s new draft diagram. I’ve also come up with a much better device for showing the out-of-system transfer between Farragut West and Farragut North than my contest version.

Working on this diagram has been great fun, and I’m incredibly proud of the reaction and attention it has got. My reasoning has always been that there is more than one way to solve a design problem, and if I’ve been able to make people think about why they like the current one, or if they find they like this one better, then that’s just a bonus!

View the diagram on Flickr for access to a 4000px version. As always, comments are welcome!

The first draft of the newly-designed Lance Wyman Washington DC Metro diagram has been out for a while now, and people have had a lot to say about it – some good and some bad. As I’ve stated before, any changes to this venerable institution were only ever going to be gradual, and this draft definitely shows that as it takes the tiniest of baby steps away from its original look.

Good changes include the substitution of standard parking symbols for the “boxy Volvo”, removal of the incredibly intrusive callout boxes regarding timetabling, a general thumbs up for more even spacing of some stations and a huge, positive two thumbs up for the use of subtitles for long names.

And there’s one improvement that I think I can take a just a little bit of credit for: the realignment of the southern leg of the Green Line so that the Naylor Road station is aligned to the District border as it is in real life. As you can see in the image above, the original diagram ignored this totally, placing Naylor Road well into Prince George’s County. My version of the diagram locates the station more correctly, and it seems that the new draft follows suit, although I find the acute angle between Congress Heights and Southern Avenue a little jarring visually.

Elements I don’t like include the drop shadows behind the dashed “peak only” lines, and the white dots on the Yellow Line between Mt Vernon Square and Fort Totten – both seem too visually complex and distracting. The hatched stub Silver Line is one solution to showing future service, but doesn’t seem a particularly elegant one to me.

The attempt to show terminus stations by way of an extra black dot also feels a little forced, especially when a terminus station is also a transfer station. Surely there’s a better way to denote the different types of stations without all of them using a white circle with a thick black outline. Users of the diagram should be able to instantly tell the difference between a normal station and a transfer station without having to decipher the legend.

Maybe the attempt to visually show terminus stations is asking too much of the diagram, especially without timetable information to support the symbol. When do trains terminate at Silver Spring instead of Glenmont? The diagram doesn’t tell us that, so what is the point of the terminus symbol at Silver Spring?

In contrast, the London Underground diagram makes no attempt to justify the different branch endings of its District Line (Standing on the platform at Earls Court station, you can take westbound District trains to Wimbledon, Richmond, Ealing Broadway and – sometimes – Kensington), instead relying on announcements and destination boards on the trains themselves.

Similarly, in Sydney, Australia (where I grew up), every train line of its extensive CityRail commuter train network runs different patterns of trains all day. There are express interurban trains that stop at just a few select stations, local trains that stop everywhere and “one-two-skip a few” trains that call at most stations, but pass through low-traffic stations without stopping. The CityRail network diagram makes little attempt to show these service patterns, yet thousands of system users get to their destination every day, simply because they pay attention to destination boards and announcements.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that here’s a limit to how much service/timetabling information can be contained in a static diagram without affecting its overall impact and ease of use, and the DC Metro diagram is struggling somewhat in finding the right balance. Giant callout boxes denoting peak/off-peak services is too much, but unlabelled terminus stations in the middle of a line don’t seem to be too useful. The more I think about it, the more I’m in favour of adopting the London and Sydney method – simply show the total extent of the line and let people work out whether the train that’s arriving will take them where they want to go. Services that only run during peak times – like the new Yellow and Orange Line service patterns – need to be clearly shown, but if final destinations simply alternate, like on the Red Line, let the users work it out on the platform. The next train to your destination will only ever be a few minutes away.

Finally, this tweet made my week… although it’ll never happen.

Whenever I fly, I try to get the window seat. I just love seeing the world go by, reduced to the size of a map far, far below me. And if I have a camera with me, then things are even better, because I love to take photos of the amazing sights I see. Here’s a few tips that I’ve picked up that might help out, followed by a number of photos that I’ve taken after the jump.

1. Seats in front of the wing are best for unobstructed viewing. Next best are seats at the back of the plane. The closer to the wing you get from the back, the more likely you are to have jet exhaust distort your image.
2. Have your camera handy at all times. Stash your camera bag under the seat in front of you before take off, or put your camera on your lap before take off, hidden under a jacket or similar. On larger flights, you can get away with taking photos almost directly after take off, simply because the hostesses can’t see you from their jump seats.
3. If your camera beeps on acquiring focus, TURN THE BEEP OFF. It’s courteous towards your fellow passengers.
4. Try and point your camera directly out of the window. The more you point it downwards, the more the thick window glass will distort your image.
5. The best times for great images is – like normal photography -  the early morning and late afternoon, when long shadows and dramatic light add interest to your shots. It’s not always a bad thing to be on the same side of the plane as the setting sun – backlit water and mountains can make for great shots.
6. Try framing the scene through the window, especially if the window is unavoidably dirty. Make a feature of the window, instead of trying to hide its flaws.
7. Push the boundaries of when you take photos (the most interesting stuff is often on early ascent or descent), but if you’re directly asked to turn the camera off or put it away, comply.
8. Expect to do a fair amount of post-processing to your images. Shooting through those thick windows and atmosphere haze towards a very distant subject will have a dulling effect on your shots that you’re going to have to work hard to correct.
9. Don’t worry about what kind of camera you have – you can get great shots with everything from an iPhone to the most expensive SLR, as you’ll see from the photos below.
10. BONUS TIP: If you’re ever on a turbo-prop plane with an iPhone, try taking a picture of the blades with it: you’ll be astounded by the unusual visual effect you get!

Click on each image to view it larger on Flickr.

The mighty Columbia River near The Dalles, Oregon. Taken with an iPhone 4, the full-size version has enough clarity to see individual wind turbines on the Washington side of the river.

A small farm seen shortly after take off from Amsterdam Schiphol airport. Hazy late afternoon light and long shadows really make this photo. Taken with a Canon Digital Rebel XT.

Sunset with spectacular clouds framed by the window edge, taken on approach to Palma de Mallorca airport, Spain. Taken with a Canon Digital Rebel XT.

The city of Rotterdam backlit by a setting sun, allowing the shining water to become the defining feature of the photo. Landmarks like the Erasmus Bridge can be clearly seen to the bottom left. Taken with a Canon Digital Rebel XT.

San Francisco as seen from an LA to Portland, Oregon flight. Taken with a Panasonic Lumix TZ, an entry-level digital point and shoot camera.

Manhattan laid out beneath me, as seen from a flight from Newark to Providence. Having my camera accessible from the start of the flight made this shot possible, as this view occurred mere minutes after takeoff. Taken with a Canon Digital Rebel XT.

Mount St Helens viewed through a particularly dirty window. Taken with an original iPhone.

PLAN BEFORE YOU START.

Take time to consider everything about your diagram. How thick do you want the route lines to be? Are they touching, or is there a slight gap between them? Are you going to use curves or straight edges where a line changes direction? Consider your station markers – will they be ticks, dots or something else? Think about how you would like to differentiate interchange stations or transit centres as well. Consider the typeface you’re going to use for station names – it should be legible and simple. When you’ve considered all these points, you’ve given yourself a set of rules that you will use to construct the diagram. Every design decision you make should be evaluated against these rules: sometimes, you can break them if needed, but it definitely helps to have them in your head as you work.

Look at an actual map of the area you’re converting into a diagram. Draw rough route lines onto it if needed. Look to simplify the routes down to their essential elements – horizontal, vertical and 45-degree angles. Identify the most complex interchanges as they almost always need the most work. Solve them first, and the rest of the diagram often builds itself. Look for interesting compositional shapes or strong vertical or horizontal axes to build your design off. Some diagrams incorporate geographical idiosyncrasies as an identifying part of the diagram, such the DC Metro diagram’s retention of the “jog” along the western Red Line between Tenleytown and Van Ness.

USE THE RIGHT SOFTWARE.

Creating a transit diagram is a very precise task, with route lines and curves that need to match up with each other perfectly to look right, an underlying grid that holds the diagram together and professional-looking typography for station names and legend. For this kind of work, you must use a vector graphics editor like Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw or Inkscape. When I see diagrams done in Photoshop or MS Paint, I wonder how the creator even started the project, let alone finish it!

DEFINE YOUR GRID.

From experience, I’ve determined that the most useful grid to have is one that equals the distance between the centre lines of two adjoining route lines. This equals the thickness of those lines if they are touching each other, but if you want a bit of a gap between your lines, then this isn’t true. So, if you have 12-point lines that touch, use a 12-point grid. If you have 10-point lines with a 2-point gap between them, then you’d also use a 12-point grid. I often leave the lines at the full thickness of the grid while I work to ensure everything is lining up right, then make them thinner as required at the end.

Carry the grid through to other elements in your design: use a multiple of it to space your stations evenly along a route. If you have a 12-point grid, you might space stations 48 or 60 points apart. If you want to have curves instead of angled lines where a route changes direction, you may want to set them up as a multiple of the grid as well, although this can often be an aesthetic decision. The bigger the radius of the curve, the more elegant your diagram can look.

LET THE SOFTWARE DO THE WORK FOR YOU…

Try to do as little manual placing or editing of your routes as possible. Snap paths to the grid to ensure precise placement. Use numerical values for transformation and movement functions as much as possible, especially when you’re moving things at angles other than right angles, as lines may not conform exactly to the grid in these situations. I love using Illustrator’s Smart Grid (Cmd/Ctrl-U) overlays when working on my diagrams, as it shows me when paths snap to points and angles.

…EXCEPT WHEN DOING IT MANUALLY WORKS BETTER.

One thing that Illustrator can’t help you with is adding curves to route lines. You might think that the “Round Corners” effect would be perfect for this task, but it simply doesn’t work. It can do 90-degree corners well enough, but its algorithm doesn’t work as well with 45-degree curves: if you have two or more route lines going around a corner together, they don’t line up with each other at all.

What I do is create a set of master curves that I then manually cut and paste into place once I’ve laid out the overall design of the diagram. Draw as many concentric circles as you need – if your diagram has a curve where five routes change direction together, then you’ll need five circles – then cut each circle into four sets of 90-degree curves. Repeat, except this time, cut your circles into eight sets of 45-degree curves. Keep these master curves off to the side and use them as required. Copy the curves you require, place them precisely over the corner you’re working on (having those Smart Guides on works really well here), cut out the straight lines underneath your new curves and delete them, then join the curves with the remaining segments of the route lines. Time consuming, but absolutely the most accurate way to add curves.

CONSIDER TYPOGRAPHY AS AN INTEGRAL PART OF THE DESIGN.

Labelling of stations is one of the most difficult parts of creating a transit diagram. Whatever you do, don’t leave it until the end. Ensure your design has enough space so that type isn’t crammed into an inappropriate space.

Erik Spiekermann once told me – in typically forthright manner – that “a designer who cannot make all the type horizontal is a loser”, and I’m definitely inclined to agree with him. Labels that are set in entirely horizontal type are far easier to read. You can alternate station names above and below a horizontal route line to save space. If you must angle your type, try and do it from one direction only to minimise the amount of head turning that people have to do. Having your type read from the right (tilting the head to the left) is preferred.

USE LAYERS.

I can’t stress this enough. Each route line should be on its own layer. Stations should be on their own layer. Text should be on its own layer. Any geography should be on its own layer. You can thank me later.

USE GLOBAL COLOURS.

I don’t understand why Illustrator even lets you make non-global colours. This is such a useful feature to quickly tweak the look of your diagram. Want your Red Line to become a Green Line? Use global colours and simply edit the swatch: that colour changes everywhere in the document.

That’s it! If you have any questions or comments on these tips, let me know about it.

Somewhat related to my previous post, here’s a new transit map of Portland for your perusal. This piece was born out of two things – a friendly after-work chat with the immensely talented Ryan Sullivan of Paste In Place, where we discussed a concept similar to this; and a chance discovery of a high-resolution scan of a 1943 streetcar/trolley map on the amazing Vintage Oregon site.

Based on that map, and information gleaned from too many other sources to mention, I have created a map that compares the passenger rail network of Portland from three different eras – 1912, 1943, and 2015, when the Portland-Milwaukie MAX line will be completed.

In this case, “passenger rail” is defined as streetcar (both old and modern), the once-plentiful interurban trains (a precursor to today’s light rail that once ran down the Willamette Valley as far as Eugene and Corvallis), MAX light rail and long-distance passenger trains (Amtrak and its precursors). Due to the somewhat incomplete nature of what my research uncovered, there may be a few little gaps and errors, but I believe what I show is a good representation of the services offered in each era.

Visually, the overlaid routes present a very compelling story. 1912 (white) was the heyday of Portland’s streetcar network and shows a dense, compact and comprehensive service for a city that covered a much smaller area than it does now. By 1943 (cyan), many of those routes had been supplanted by cheaper to run trolleys or buses. The automobile was gaining in popularity, and by 1958, the once ubiquitous streetcar had totally disappeared from Portland’s streets. Finally, the modern revival of Portland’s rail system is illustrated in the magenta overlay of 2015, which shows he new streetcar system, MAX light rail and today’s urban sprawl into once-distant suburbs – look at the vast distances the MAX lines cover compared to the compact streetcar routes of old. And I’m not even showing the whole extent, preferring to concentrate on Portland’s inner core so that downtown can still be made out.

Some other points of interest: two of the 1912 interurban routes through southwest Portland mirror the modern day I-5 and Barbur Boulevard almost exactly – rails have been firmly supplanted by road here. The Springwater Corridor which can plainly be seen swooping through southeast towards Gresham and beyond in 1912 and 1943 is now a popular bike path and part of the 40 Mile Loop, while other old rail corridors have been reused by modern-day MAX alignments. Also of note is the Council Crest route into the Southwest Hills. Now just a small city park with a view, up until 1929 Council Crest boasted an amazing amusement park and an observation tower!

As always, comments are welcome. I’d particularly like to know if anyone can see any obvious errors, as I’m almost certain I’ve missed some smaller parts of the early networks. Click here to see the map on Flickr, where you can log in to view it super large!