I know this isn’t technically “fuck cars” but since transit is one of the solutions to cars and there’s no transit comminity on Lemmy (yet, thinking of making one if there is enough interest), I thought people here would enjoy this post.

So you know how lots of transit systems use colours to denote different lines? And you know how lots of other transit systems have tons of interlining and branching? I had a random idea while looking at transit maps, that maybe we can use colour mixing rules to denote systems that have both.

For example, in a city where you have a long downtown corridor that is served by one central line, you might have a red line and a blue line, that funnel into the downtown corridor to become the purple line. On a map you can show this symbolically by having the branches or feeder lines’ colours fading into the combined colour.

Or, if you have a line that forks into two terminal stations near the end, it can be the green line, and splits into a yellow line and a blue line.

Or, in systems like the Berlin and Vienna S-Bahn, where you have many lines all funneling into two major downtown corridors, they can be called the white and black lines, which split into various colours further out from the core, as white and black are what you get when many colours merge, based on additive and subtractive colour mixing respectively.

I think this will go a long way toward hammering in the point that these interlined sections are served by all the lines that feed into them, for example, if you need to take a train between two stations on the purple line, you can logically work out that both red and blue trains take you there just the same without ever needing to consult a map to see which trains interline along what corridors. I also just don’t like it when transit maps show a bunch of parallel lines of different colours, as that makes me think there are that many tracks, whereas in reality the majority of the time they’re just funneling onto a single two track corridor.

What do you think? If a real transit system tried this do you think it would work? Or would it just go over people’s heads and no one would know what the colours are supposed to mean?