2021 Year in Review

December 31, 2021 - Permalink
2021 has been a hectic year for the Metro Route Atlas. This year marked one of the most productive, as we quite literally covered the entirety of Spanish Speaking South and Central America and got farther into Brazil than expected (initial projections suggested that we would not make it to Brazil at all).
Part of the productivity increase is due to not having a crippling burnout period like in 2020 (there was still one in 2021, but it did not impact the Metro Route Atlas particularly strongly). And part of it is due to the relatively simpler networks covered in 2021. Cities like Pachuca, Neuquén, and Cartagena are very easy to make pages and system maps for. But there were plenty of very complex cities - with the CDMX (Ciudad de México) and CABA (Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires) easily being the most time consuming and the CDMX getting extra for literally opening lines multiple times when I was building the page and map for it.
But besides completing major projects, there were plenty of other improvements for the Metro Route Atlas.
  • We overhauled and greatly improved our BRT List, making it one of the best documented lists currently available on the internet (an exceedingly low bar, given that we do not actually have much data for most of the corridors). We also formally integrated ITDP score breakdowns into the database directly, and started MRA Scores for keeping track of justifications for when the MRA decides a corridor is or is not worth putting on the website.
  • We finally began a system for tracking third party media citations, allowing us to track the source when information is acquired from sites other than Wikipedia, transit operators, or database sites such as Urbanrail.net/BRTData.org
  • Our Blog system now supports multiple pages, and now has a proper post archive that allows viewing all posts and 'searching' by tag.
  • We began a new rolling stock mini-database which has allowed for a variety of dimensional comparisons that we were entirely unable to do before
  • We now have a BRT-Lite category to support better classifications for substandard or short bus priority corridors
  • We developed the iBRT tool for BRT route visualization in Colombia. While this tool is no longer anticipated to be used (keeping route information up to date would take time away from building new pages and maps), it was an excellent proof of concept that allowed for the disentangling of TransMilenio.
  • We finally decided on guidelines for classifying Tram/Light Rail and Metro/Light Metro. The fact that these have remained as-is for half a year without getting overhauled suggests that they're holding up fairly well. We'll see what happens when we start covering Europe (smaller countries with fewer systems may be trialed first), but it's a good sign and so far the only systems that have fought against these designations kicking and screaming have been the Izmir Metro with its five-car coupled high floor light rail vehicles (why did they even choose this technology) and the Piraeus tram extension in Athens, which looks like it was designed by an American real estate developer given the single track partially mixed traffic loops.
  • Country Mode Definitions are gone. This decouples local definitions from the MRA's and means that we do not need to try to shoehorn hundreds of definitions against ours. We can safely claim that the Nanhai Tram Line 1 is a light rail line and not a tram (it's actually a light metro set to be downgraded to light rail), and are able to break down French Tramways however we want (looking at you Rouen).
And finally, we would like to thank everyone on the RMTransit Discord for providing a constant feed of news, especially those who helped out with Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. We'll try to get to the collapse of Metrovías sometime in the next year.
Please continue to support us in 2022 as we build out pages and system maps for Brazil and potentially begin our Metropolitan Area pages project (details to be finalized).