From Santa Rosa down to Santa Clara, the Bay Area is well connected by public transit. If you have the time and the persistence, you can get to a lot of places without a car, even the vineyards and redwood forests of the Russian River Valley.
Discovering all of that access, though, requires a regional transit map that’s not just informative but also visually appealing and easy to decipher quickly. And that’s a tall order: The Bay Area stretches 140 miles from Cloverdale to Gilroy and has 27 distinct transit agencies reaching out to its farthest fringes. Design a map with a confusing spaghetti plate of overlapping routes, and riders are likely to throw up their hands in frustration and jump in a car instead. That’s why when the Metropolitan Transportation Commission set out to create a new transit map (click the link for a large version) in 2023, finding that Goldilocks sweet spot was a top goal.
“Part of the balance is deciding which of the thousands of features do you put on this particular map?” Gordon Hansen, the MTC’s Mapping and Wayfinding project manager, told SFGATE. “And then the other question is, ‘How do you use this map in concert with other maps that can explore more detailed scales?’”
Introduced in April, the new map is the latest version of a product that the MTC, a planning and coordinating transportation agency for all nine Bay Area counties, has been creating since the 1980s. It’s also part of the MTC’s ongoing project to standardize maps and signs for all 27 agencies to help riders navigate and transfer between them.
Jumana Nabti, BART’s manager of access programs, was the transit operator liaison during the design process. She told SFGATE that she hopes it will show people how they can travel across the entire Bay Area by rail, bus and ferry and reach far-flung places they may have thought were inaccessible without driving…