It's called Metro Station Designer, I shared an early version here two years ago.
Here's how far it's come!

I live in the Netherlands and was wondering if I can find out where the doors stop on the platform so that I always have a seat on the train, and how does this work in your country?

Thanks in advance, I'm really curious to see if you can help me

People were stuck in the trains for an hour while the train barely moved. It was said the fans and ventilators were turned off for some reason prompting people to walk on tracks.

I live in San Francisco, and occasionally find myself taking buses in nearby San Mateo County. The original map was designed in 2005 and wasn’t bad for the time, but it’s also been modified so much by the operator that it’s gotten actively worse in the years since. I mean, look at it:

• No indication of frequency. Routes that run every 15 minutes all day are shown exactly the same as ones that have only a handful of trips a day.
• School routes are too prominent. These routes run once or twice a day primarily to take students between home and school. I don’t think they existed at the time of the original map, but either way, they do not deserve to be shown at the same level as all-day routes (as an extension of the above).
• Overnight routes are shown on the same map. The ECR Owl, 296 Owl, and 397 run overnight to replace the ECR, 296, and 292 respectively, and I think showing them on the main system map as if they ran during the day is misleading.
• One line for multiple overlapping routes, and the label placement is not great. Routes are impossible to follow, and this is especially important for a suburban area with many circuitous routes.
• No directional arrows for one-way routes. Well, they’re in the PDF if you look under the basemap, but they’ve been hidden in the many modifications since. There are also arrows and street name labels for routes that no longer exist.

So I figured I’d try my hand at a redesign, with both a daytime map and a separate (admittedly quite empty) overnight map. This is the exact same network that exists today, but presented differently. I’m not a designer by any means, just someone with a copy of Affinity Designer 2 and a little too much free time. I like to think I have a bit more design sense than the average programmer, even if it might be considered a bit basic.

• I started by converting the GTFS schedule data from SamTrans and adjacent operators into shapefiles, importing them into QGIS alongside basemap layers from OpenStreetMap, and exporting PDFs with the desired layout (for which I tried to match the official map as closely as possible, instead of north-up). Then I cleaned up and simplified the paths in Affinity, and shifted lines over to remove overlaps where needed before adding labels.
• I had to manually remove overlaps since Affinity’s PDF export is somewhat broken, but thankfully it wasn’t absurdly difficult, just took more time than I would have liked. Overlaps are fully removed for SamTrans routes, but I haven’t bothered to do so for adjacent operators since they’re not the focus of the maps anyway.
• Frequencies are indicated by line thickness and label size, but not colour. The thickest lines are for the most frequent routes, and thin dashed lines are for routes that only run a handful times a day, like school-oriented and commuter routes. 20-45-70 is a strange set of frequency tiers, but I wanted all-day service to show up as regular routes, and there were some routes that ran less than hourly but still all day.
• Each route has its own colour, arbitrarily chosen from a limited palette of 14 daytime colours and 4 overnight colours. I tried to pick relatively distinct colours for routes that ran close to or intersected with each other, somewhat inspired by my former home bus operator York Region Transit (Ontario, Canada)’s system map. It’s difficult to use some colours more because some routes are very long and run practically the entire length of the county. In theory I could have gone with a more conventional frequency-based colouring, but I figured I’d try this approach to improve readability, especially in areas with a lot of routes.
• Labels aren’t quite complete. I’m sure I could have filled the rest in if I spent a bit more time on it, but I think it’s more than good enough For Now to demonstrate the concept. I could have also missed some minor details.
• We don’t^\1]) talk about^\2]) Atherton^\3]).

I even tried a second version of these maps in which I’ve renumbered all the routes: to remove the first digit which I’ve always felt was somewhat redundant, and to lengthen the numbers of the school routes to make them less prominent. The numbering scheme is explained in the last image.

I’d love to get your thoughts, both on the map design and the renumbering. Thanks!

submission statement: Casey Stokes criticizes AJC articles by Alex Taylor, Eric Tanenblatt, and Bahman Irvani for opposing Beltline rail with misstated facts and undisclosed conflicts. Their proposals redirect tax funds to autonomous vehicles or buses, ignoring rail’s capacity and longevity.

Chicago Transit Authority

Hi r/transit,

I commute in Cologne and I'm building Snell on my own, a free web app for regional rail in North Rhine-Westphalia: https://getsnell.de/?von=reddit-transit (the interface is in German). It's my own project, so I'm posting it as a discussion and I'd value honest critique.

The idea: the people on the train know best where it is. Without live data, Snell shows a calculated position from the timetable and labels it that way. As soon as someone on board chooses to share their location, it becomes a live position for everyone waiting further down the line. Riders can also report delays, cancellations or crowded trains, and others confirm or dispute them with 👍 or 👎. It covers 224 lines, including regional trains, RRX, long-distance lines, FlixTrain and 12 Stadtbahn (light rail) lines in Cologne.

Privacy was a design goal from the start. There's no name and no account. Shared positions are deleted after 30 minutes and sharing stops after 3 hours at most. After 10 minutes without movement Snell asks if you're still on the train and stops 5 minutes later if there's no answer. On many lines sharing also ends by itself once you get off. No third-party trackers.

Honest limits: it's a web app, so it only shares while the screen is on (a trip mode keeps it on). A proper app that also shares in the background is in the works. It's only useful in NRW for now.

Something new: Snell goes open source this week. I'll add the link to the code in the comments once it's up, so anyone can check how the calculated positions work and what happens to shared locations.

I use AI as a tool while building. The idea, the decisions and the testing are mine.

What I'd like to hear from you:

- Can rider-shared positions fill gaps where official real-time data is thin, or is that wishful thinking?

- What would make you share your own location on a commute?

- Are there similar crowd-sourced projects elsewhere I should learn from?

An intersection of multiple lines: JR Joban Line, Tsukuba Express, and Tobu Skytree Line (with Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line through-service).

RTD gets a lot of (warranted) grief for sending many of its lines along highways and industrial corridors, but there are some parts of the network that feel quite genuinely urban.

Article about the lack of automated trains in the US, focusing on the WMATA Red Line, Honolulu Skyline and the LA Sepulveda Line.

Some US transit systems weigh whether to run trains without a human at the controls