Welcome Torontoist and Livejournal Toronto visitors!

Greetings to those visiting my transit map from the Livejournal Toronto community and Torontoist, who describe the map as “the best map ever in the history of anything.” Thanks for the love, guys! You’ve got me all verklempt.

  1. Directive0

    December 15, 2006 at 11:00 am

    One of our astute members posted the link to your map. We are a group of long/skateboard enthusiasts, most of our members use public trans to get to pretty much any hill, spot, or location. This map is more then a good resource, its a godsend. Thanks a bunch and keep on developing, we appreciate it!

  2. Nick

    December 15, 2006 at 12:59 pm

    Ian, you are an anti-misanthropist!! This is so amazing and it is astonishing to think you did this on your own. It is light-years ahead of the TTC’s own website. It will be awesome to meld to Google’s transit shedule planner for the TTC when it comes out (long promised – I am keeping an eye out for this every day but so far not yet).

    I’d love to see alternate station entrance on the map with some sort of symbol to indicate whether they are .

    Do you want some help with this?

    Nick

  3. Dave T.

    December 15, 2006 at 4:48 pm

    Great map! I’ve been mad at the TTC for years for their poor map skills, even though I now live in New York. Or maybe NYC opened my eyes to what a good map should look like. The TTC maps in the subway are far too simplistic (hello, streetcars?) and the Ride Guide is far too detailed and small-type to be readable.

    One suggestion – could you correct a longtime wrong and thicken the streetcar lines (or change their color) so that they are discernable from the mere-mortal bus lines? Rail transit is rail transit, even if it moves slowly in street traffic at times. A casual rider should not have to know the route number to identify streetcars from buses, and this can be quite useful for line transfers downtown. I see you tried doing this on the true right-of-way streetcar routes, but I think that all streetcar lines deserve rapid-transit designation. (The dashing is also confusing, as it often implies part-time use)

  4. Ian Stevens

    December 15, 2006 at 6:17 pm

    Nick, I’ll see about setting up a page for people to contribute info. For station entrances, I’m thinking of an interface whereby people click on the map or enter GPS info for an entrance, along with optional address and picture.

    The forthcoming TTC integration with Google Transit, when it happens, should make my map obsolete. There’s no way that I can provide the same level of service for route planning.

  5. Ian Stevens

    December 15, 2006 at 6:26 pm

    Dave, the thickness and style of the lines on my map is the same as that on the TTC ride guide. Any differences are purely accidental. Having said that, I will take your suggestion into consideration when I do another render. As it stands, altering the map in Illustrator and generating new images is a painstaking process, mostly because Illustrator is a POS on large files. Still, it’s the best available.

  9. Mike

    December 19, 2006 at 3:59 pm

    Congratulations on this, you beat the TTC to the punch (surprise, surprise).

    Incidentaly – where can we send money for your legal defense fund? The TTC never cared much for sharing – so I can’t imagine they’ll be overly happy to have you providing ad-revenue-free access to information that they eventually wanted to charge ad-revenue for.

    Not to be a bring-down; as a developer who tried to do exactly what you’ve done I admire the accomplishment, but yeah, I can’t imagine this good deed will go un-punished.

    Cheers

  10. Cynthia

    October 29, 2007 at 3:07 pm

    Hey Ian, thanks so much for the map – it’s what I needed for AGES. I use it regularly; from looking up my ever changing class locations to telling my mom where to get off for her favourite LV/Prada/Holts/Chanel store.

    Thank you thank you thank you for creating something that is so simple to use, and so effective.

  11. bcoe

    May 30, 2008 at 2:55 pm

    holy crap this is a real map! finally some thing a human can use.
    now if it only had time tables…

    thank you very much.

  12. bhaktan

    July 8, 2009 at 12:43 am

    It is amazing the Toronto transit map, i really thank what you do, I have been using this for over a year and has been wonderful to have this tool.

    Now, do you know if there is one for the Montreal public system?