BART Map

Description:

This was my attempt at redesigning the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) map to make it cleaner and abstracted.

Idea:

The original BART map that was in place on the transit system was heavily geographically-centric. Whenever I looked at the map it always looked far more cluttered and bordered on annoying to look at. I wanted create something as a reaction to that old map by further separating the system itself from the geography that surrounded it. This would make the map cleaner and much more easy to look at. Whether this abstraction of the map would actually help riders is an unknown.

Process:

This map was actually developed before I worked on the Bay Area Metro Transit Map and was my first serious attempt at a transit map redesign. I had was always interested in working on an interpretation of real system map but had never really pursued it till I worked on this one. I was already very familiar with the BART map. I’ve seen it plenty of times. I got particular inspiration to work on this from when I was introduced to the New York Subway Map developed by Massimo Vignelli.

Around that time, I was entering my second year at UCLA and I began to get seriously interested in public transportation. I had just learned how to effectively use Adobe Illustrator and decided to tackle this as a personal project.