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Bart red line1/8/2024 ![]() ![]() Image by Mack Male licensed under Creative Commons. From Montreal, Quebec to Casper, Wyoming, there are countless other examples where transit systems use colors for nomenclature.Įven though colored lines appear on maps, San Francisco's BART simply designates routes by end stations. This graph only includes major heavy rail (such as a metro or subway), light rail, commuter rail, streetcar, and bus rapid-transit lines in the United States. The Chicago ‘L’ is the only major system to have rail names with a Pink and Brown Line. Orange is also quite common, but the Washington Metro’s other two colored lines, Yellow and Silver, are not. Primary colors are the most common line designations in the United States, with blue placing first, and green and red tying for second. Primary colors are the most popular for naming transit. Of the transit operators that the Federal Transit Administration has identified as heavy rail, light rail, commuter rail, or streetcar systems, 18 use colors for naming. Other systems, such as the Chicago ‘L’, adopted a color system to simplify and modernize its line names, as well as mirror other systems with color names such as Washington and Boston. Line colors represented different aspects of the city that they served, such as the Red Line serving Harvard, home of the Crimson sports teams. Finding the Wiehle-Reston East-Largo Line or Branch Avenue - Greenbelt Lines, as you would do if you used the end-stations for naming lines (like the San Francisco BART does), is more difficult you would have find the all of the end stations first to identify the line.īoston’s MBTA, commonly known as the “T,” is a perfect example of color-based lines – in the 1960s, the system map adopted colors to make the T easier to navigate. The primary reason to name transit lines after their colors on maps is simplicity: if I tell you to find the Silver or Green line on a map, it is quite easy. American transit systems often have the peculiar tendency to take the names of colors. Transit lines can have unique names, such as the Piccadilly or Victoria lines in London numbers, like the Paris Metro letters, like the San Francisco Muni and many other designations. That’s because colors are a simple and user-friendly way to organize a system. Here and many places elsewhere, our subway goes with colors. There are numerous ways to distinguish transit lines, including using unique names or symbols. It’s still interesting, so we’re sharing it again! We first published this article on March 21, 2017. Image by Adam Fagen licensed under Creative Commons. ![]()
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