A New Ticket Machine Map for Portland---Moore's Law of Cartography

"How often do you have to do that?" I asked the man, with the white mustache and baseball cap, standing on the curb of Yamhill, along busy Pioneer Courthouse Square.

He made a funny expression, of being puzzled, as if he had never thought about the question before. It seemed to have taken him off guard. After a second I realized that I was now interrupting his work, so I waived off my query.

"Whenever they change the route," is the most I got out of him, but I inferred that it had been a while since anyone had needed to pry off the oblong polygonal white maps of the Max route, that were on the front of the ticket machines along the curb.

He was using a long screwdriver to pry the old one off. It peeled as he pulled it off the machine.

It looked like this:

"The new one is up there," he said, motioning up Yamhill to the corner of the square. He then proceeded about his businesses, which required no small amount of physical strength. I took the opportunity to let him go back to his work, and slinked up the street, leaving my big yellow backpack along the curve back where he was working.

At the other machine I looked at the new route map and quickly decided it was far superior to the old one, which I had studied quite thoroughly when I saw the man with the baseball cap and mustache, and orange vest, approaching with the new maps under his arms. I knew this would be the last chance to see it on that particular machine. When he'd put down the new maps---he was carrying several of them---they made a solid metallic clunk on the sidewalk.

The new map had been necessitated by the opening of the new Max lines that crossed the recently opened Tilikum Crossing, the first new span across the Willamette since the Fremont opened in 1973.

The new lines had required much greater detail in the downtown area so the designers of the new had increased the scale for the central part of Portland. It was much richer in detail. The designers had used the lessons from the previous maps and had increased the depth of the detail in a way that seemed pleasing and natural. It was sort of like a Moore's law of cartography in effect---you can get finer detail of the design on successive iterations, based on successful experiments in visual/spatial representation on the previous larger scale. From those successful experiment, one can enhances detail on a finer lever in a way that the eye and brain natural follow.

But I'm just saying the obvious, I suppose.