The History of Vancouver Rapid Transit

I spent today working on a personal project. Based on Paul Hillsdon’s animated gif, I’ve made a little Flash slideshow chronicling the history of Vancouver’s rapid transit systems. The 1977-2009 section is almost identical to Mr Hillsdon’s (with a minor tweak to cover the demonstration stage of the Expo Line circa 1983 (which I’m not sure counts, but what the heck)).

However, I’ve also added some extras. To make this a bit more “historical” there are now BCER Interurban lines based on data from the Gábor Sándi’s excellent Tram Site. It’s interesting to see how the system for 2009 kind of, somewhat, in a way resembles the system of 1950.

The rest of the changes are purely interface related: a legend and a control system. This thing is very much in a beta stage (or a charlie stage?). From a design perspective, I definitely need to pretty this thing up. Adding more data would be fun, but probably time consuming. Population, density, ridership, politics, etc. could all eventually be a part of this. If I had access to more maps/data, I could also start throwing in things like bus exchanges & loops, trolley routes, FastBuses, streetcars, HOV lanes, cancelled freeways. Of course, once all that clutter starts to creep in, I’d also need to create an option for turning on and off routes/layers.

But seeing as the wife thinks I’m a nut for having spent most of a Sunday building Flash maps of SkyTrains, I should probably cut this out for awhile.