A great example of late 1970s American transit map design from Denver’s Regional Transportation District (RTD) with thick, chunky route lines, minimalist design sensibilities and tightly letter-spaced sans serif headings.
The map has the potential to get messy really quickly, but it’s actually all handled rather deftly and cleanly. Colour-coding differentiates between different service types (local, express, circulator and regional), and route numbers and road names are placed inside the thick route lines, which generally makes them fairly easy to follow across the map. Some of the routes do get pretty squiggly and overly detailed, but overall, this is a very credible effort at showing a comprehensive overview of a large bus network. Also, RTD is still using the exact same logo today, some 40-odd years later. Awesome.
Three-and-a-half stars out of five.