Official Map: Miami-Dade Metrorail System

Miami’s Metrorail just opened a new station at Miami International Airport, and decided to create an entirely new line (the Orange Line) to celebrate. Along with that, comes a new system map… which is, unfortunately, pretty terrible.

Have we been there? No.

What we like: The icon for overnight/long-term parking lots is actually pretty neat.

What we don’t like: Poorly chosen background colours make the road drid hard to distinguish from the background. On that note, why include the road grid at all if none of the roads are labelled? And do we really need to see all the runways and taxiways at MIA?

The two route lines are incredibly poorly drawn, with very sloppy curves - especially into the MIA station and between the Civic Center and Culmer stations. There’s a slight gap between the lines between South Miami and University stations, so it looks like the lines were drawn separately next to each other, rather than using tools in the software to duplicate or offset one line to create the other. Shonky.

Huge and ugly station name labels.

Our rating: GIS software really should be taken away from people making transit maps for public consumption. This map is uninspiring, bland and poorly executed. 1 star.

(Source: Official Miami-Dade County website)