This graph only includes major heavy rail (such as a metro or subway), light rail, commuter rail, streetcar, and bus rapid-transit lines in the United States. From Montreal, Quebec to Casper, Wyoming, there are countless other examples where transit systems use colors for nomenclature. Did you know that the NYC subway lines are marked by 10 Pantone® spot colors? Even E.
Colors were sampled from official rapid transit diagrams* of every system in the world and charted in several ways to explore how each city has used them to color code each line or service. Rapid transit systems include subways, metros, undergrounds, railways, etc. operating frequently in urban areas.
Color Notes General Color Notes This page details the colors utilized on this website as provided by official sources, arranged by city. Only cities with published and easily accessible color schemes are listed here. This page is explicitly a data bank containing publicly available information.
Using letters, numbers, and colors is about as easy as it gets. We're introducing letters for these lines, and numbers to refer to their services. For example, the Broad Street Line [B] is the B, while the local train is the B1.
Last week marked the 30th anniversary of the CTA adopting its color-coded rail line system. The change happened on February 21, 1993, when the agency decided that instead of using streets or names for the lines, it would use a color designation, hence the birth of the Blue Line, Red Line, Green Line, and so forth. Lines are not referred to by color, as "the red line", nor by names corresponding to colors, as "the Seventh Ave line".
Instead, signage and official announcements continue to identify lines by fussy details of train letters and numbers. On a similar note, Greater Greater Washington posted a graphic recently noting the prevalence of certain colors in U.S. rail, light rail or streetcar systems.
Stephen Hudson notes at GGW that most transit systems do use colors whether or not those are included in the name of the lines. San Francisco's BART system, for example, color-codes its lines on maps using blue, green, orange, red and. The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) today marked the 25th anniversary of when CTA converted the names of its rail lines to a color.
Before moving on to the numbered trains of the IRT, I'd like to mention that the colored identification bullets were only occasionally seen on roll signs; especially not on older train cars, which stayed with older roll signs that were simple black and white. Newer cars of the time, the R-40, 42, 44 and 46, employed the color bullets.