Fantasy maps re-imagine public transit

Some transit advocates attend meetings. Others write letters. Some even picket outside subway stations.

Numan Parada makes maps.

At a time when a subway-to-the-sea along Wilshire Boulevard is still far from a reality, he is plotting it on a map anyway.

With the click of a mouse, he puts a notch next to the Getty Center on the rail line he envisions branching off Wilshire Boulevard to follow the 405 Freeway corridor to the San Fernando Valley.

"That's a good place for a station," he said. "It's an obvious traffic generator."

In the same way, he has mapped out on his computer nearly a dozen other rail stations along light-rail and subway lines that don't exist, from La Habra to Chatsworth.

He and other amateur cartographers are re-imagining public transportation in Los Angeles by crafting ambitious conceptual maps that depict the county blanketed with an East Coast-style rail network.

Their transit networks look convincingly like the stylized, color-coded visual aids posted in city buses and trains.

But the fantasy maps depict future transportation routes even their creators acknowledge will probably never be built.

"Most people are dismissive of seeing such a big system on paper," said Parada, 25, whose conceptual map of a future Los Angeles features a nearly omnipresent grid of rail lines (thetransitcoalition.us/ConNP01.htm).

"While I don't sincerely think a system like this is realistic to build, I think it can give hope," he said.

Critics say the maps are misguided; rail is too expensive and ill-suited for a city as decentralized as Los Angeles.

But the maps, circulated online and created in the midst of what many are calling an unprecedented level of concern about traffic and public transportation, have also drawn admirers from within the county transportation agency, such as Neil Sadler, lead designer for Metro's design studio.

"This looks like the London tube map," he said after examining Parada's map.

It should, said Parada, of Tujunga. He paid $23 for the Johnston font used on the London Underground map to give his fantasy map an air of authenticity.

Parada started sketching maps of the San Fernando Valley when he was 13, and by the time he was in high school, he had upgraded to using a Paint program on his computer to design small transportation maps.

He now works for the Transit Coalition, a public transportation advocacy group based out of a strip-mall storefront-turned-office in Sylmar.