A Fantasy Transit Map for San Francisco

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a map is worth the difference between getting lost for two hours and getting to your destination in 20 minutes, anxiety-free.

Brian Stokle knows a thing or two about maps: he's been creating them since he was six years-old. “Back then,” the transportation planner and cartographer recalls, “It was imaginary city maps, or adapting existing cities by adding a subway network, or imagining what a region would look like with rising sea levels.” Though he did briefly work at the Rand McNally bookstore, it was during his graduate studies in urban planning at Columbia University that he began to make serious maps, inspired, he says, “by using Paris Metro maps when I lived in France, following my natural curiosity about the world, and holding the belief that stories and information are sometimes best told through a map. Working alongside Steve Boland and Jay Primus, both of whose work I admire, has pushed me to make better maps. Other inspirations are Eddie Jabbour's Kick Map of the New York City Subway system, London's tube map, Paris' metro map, and incorporating elements of other good maps I've run across.”