Transportation
How San Francisco Got Its New Rider-Friendly Transit Map
The design uses weighted lines to show which buses come more often than others.
Jay Primus still remembers the first time the Muni map got the best of him. It was 1999, and he’d just moved to San Francisco. He was deciding between the 2-Clement and the parallel 38-Geary bus lines. Both looked more or less the same on the Muni map so he went with the 2. Big mistake: that was a much less frequent line, and Primus recalls a wait that felt like approximately “forever.”
The lesson stayed with him over the years: a transit map should not only show where trains or buses go but how often they come, and it should convey that information quickly even to novice riders. “I wanted a map that, at a glance, you can get a sense of what service will be most useful,” he says. “You shouldn’t need a secret decoder ring to figure it out.”