Those TriMet designers are at it again! Just a week or so after their superb TriMet/WMATA mash-up comes this new map that reimagines Portland’s MAX light rail as the Bay Area’s BART.
On first glance, it’s another near-perfect rendition of the source map and there’s a lot of neat touches. The reworking of TriMet’s logo to match BART’s famous lower-case “ba” logo is wonderful, and the accurate depiction of the Red Line’s corkscrew to get from Gateway up towards the airport is masterfully done. Reducing WES to the “Beige Line” seems somehow appropriate, and the call out box to show its limited hours is perfect.
A couple of minor quibbles: the real BART map contains no vertical route lines at all, so they look a little “wrong” here. However, rejigging all of them to the slight rightwards angle that BART uses would be problematic, so I can see why that’s been left out. Also, it looks like the typeface used is Akzidenz Grotesk, when BART uses Frutiger. Some more blue locality labels for Gresham, Beaverton, etc. would have been nice. Finally, a couple of typos that immediately stood out: “TRIMET sytem map” at top left, and “Albina/Missisissipi“.
A fun reaction to this one on Twitter:
Source: TriMet/Twitter
Dang those typos are killing me! I fixed them in the pdf: https://trimet.org/pdfs/maps/TriMet-BART.pdf 🙂