The Alaska Marine Highway System needed a good transit map; the system is super confusing to an outsider like me. So I spent a few evenings putting one together. It was a fun challenge, especially as I don’t have a lot of opportunities to make transit maps.

Most fun, of course, was distorting the geography. Many areas are compressed, stretched, expanded, etc. in order to best show connections. For example: in reality, Prince Rupert is closer to Skagway than it is to Bellingham.

While it was a bit outdated by the time I finished, it still was accurate enough to come in handy a couple of years later when I decided to sail the Inside Passage and needed to figure out exactly which boats went where.

The design incorporates some helpful suggestions from Cameron Booth, whose Transit Maps blog has a writeup on an earlier draft (which has some odd colors due to an exporting error on my part), including some further comments from me.