Fantasy Metro Maps for DC

A side benefit of rapid transit systems is that they tend to yield simple, colorful schematic diagrams of their cities.  A city like London, for example, can seem sprawling and incomprehensible on a standard wall map, but the iconic Tube map renders it memorable and navigable.  Mark Ovenden’s brilliant coffee table book “Transit Maps of the World” explores this phenomenon exhaustively.

Washington’s Metro (henceforth WMATA) is the second-busiest system in the U.S. after the New York (take that, Chicago!), and it also features a famous map.  The history of its development has been well chronicled in Zachary Schrag’s “The Great Society Subway“.  While I love WMATA and generally depend on it, I can also see its many flaws.  There are lots of core DC neighborhoods it doesn’t cover, vast swaths of suburbia it likewise neglects, and plenty of strange routing decisions (why must the orange and blue lines both cut across the Mall, and why should anyone trying to get from Columbia Heights to Arlington have to cross the Mall twice?).

In real life, expanding or redesigning a metro system requires not only billions of dollars, but also decades of legal battles with property owners who stand in the way of planned routes.  I don’t have billions of dollars and I don’t feel like getting into legal battles, though.  All I have is Google Maps, which lets me draw multicolored lines on satellite maps of the DC area.

I have two fantasy metro maps to share with my readers, but they’re not in competition.  One is from my friend Max, who took the approach of scrapping WMATA altogether and designing a brand new system from scratch.  The other is one I designed a while back, though I made a few new changes, based on a hypothetical expansion of the current system.  Neither of our systems is very realistic, although Max’s is pure fantasy and mine is more like wishful thinking.

Here’s Max’s map:

And here’s mine:

Click the links for more details on both.  I’d say they’re works in progress.  Max and I have both lived in New York, and I gather his design for downtown in particular draws on Manhattan’s example.  He included an inner ring line that seems designed entirely to facilitate our own lifestyles, plus an outer ring that’s supposed to be light rail.  We’ve had a bit of debate about his idea for a “Potomac Shuttle” that connects Dupont, Georgetown, Rosslyn, and National Airport, but judge for yourselves.

My map takes the existing system as its base.  The Red, Green, and Orange Line routes through the District are entirely unchanged, although I’ve expanded all three lines further into the suburbs.  With the Blue and Yellow Lines, I changed their routing to cover areas of the District that lack metro access: Georgetown, H Street, and Upper Georgia Avenue in particular.*  I also radically altered the Blue Line route through Virginia to cover areas like Shirlington, Columbia Pike, and Annandale, and I ended up creating two separate suburban spurs.  I included the planned Silver and Purple Lines, and in the latter case I expanded it to form a complete ring, including areas like Tysons Corner and National Harbor.  Finally, I added two entirely original lines: a Brown Line covering underserved areas of Montgomery and Prince George’s, along with the Wisconsin and Rhode Island corridors in the District, and a Pink Line to urbanize the Dulles aerotropolis.

As far as my suburban routes go, an easy criticism is that they provide too much capacity to areas that lack the density to support rapid transit.  I’d counter that the entire region is projected to grow, that there’s enormous pent-up demand for transit-accessible housing, and that building metro lines through low-density suburbs creates incentives to densify those suburbs.  And since this is my fantasy map, I’m going to discount the inevitable NIMBY resistance.

I won’t argue that one of our maps is better than the other, since they’re based on totally different premises.  But I encourage you to leave suggestions for both in the comments!

*The new Blue Line route through DC is not my original idea; I got it from Greater Greater Washington, which got it from a real-life proposal.  Aside from that and the planned Purple and Silver routes, every other change to the existing map is my own.

UPDATE: Max has made some major changes to his map since I first posted this, and it looks pretty fantastic.  Check it out here.