2022 Year in Review

2022 has been a hectic year for the Metro Route Atlas, though we said that last year as well. The main achievement this year was completing the Americas with the Brazil project's conclusion (with the exception of French overseas territories in the Americas). This marks the first major milestone for the Metro Route Atlas as far as geographic completion is concerned.

Notably, instead of continuing straight in to Oceania or ASEAN, time was invested into other side projects. The most significant was the Light Metro Project, which began at the start of the year. Notably high investment for each page made, it also had the highest payout in terms of output quality and we will be continuing this project moving forwards.

The second major project begun was the Airport Transit Project. Originally aimed at tracking gadgetbahns, it expanded in scope to all fixed guideway airport links and has quickly expanded. As this is a project with fairly minimal investment per page due to the scope of the project, we expect this to complete in its entirety in 2023 or 2024.

The final major project begun was the BRT Infrastructure project. Originally starting as a spreadsheet to track corridors so that I wouldn't be repeating work multiple times over, it expanded into both a spreadsheet and mapping project, similar to what the Transport Politic has done but on a much more focused scale. Originally, the mapping was done in Felt, but this proved to be a mistake, as Felt had hard scaling limitations and the project hit those scaling limitations about an eighth through the intended scope of the project. As a result, the Felt data was exported out and we began using the much slower and fussier process of manually mapping and annotating GeoJSON data. This has resulted in a much slower process for data entry. Of the three main projects undertaken, this is the one that is most subject to scope creep and so it will continue to exist on the side. It is currently unknown what the scope will be, but we expect that it will be comparatively lower priority due to the high maintenance burden.

Aside from the main projects, we made improvements and other gains elsewhere on the website. In particular, regional rail classifications and map standard updates have streamlined processes and classification to the point where the modes page is quite stable nowadays. We hope to continue similar improvements into 2023.

We'd like to close out by continuing to thank the members of the Global Transit & Infrastructure Channel on Discord (formerly the RMTransit Discord). It is partially thanks to the members of the Discord server that we are able to keep this website up to date on new openings, and we received an exceptional amount of support from the Scandinavia-based members of the channel when working on the BRT Infrastructure project.

We wish all of our visitors and readers a fantastic 2023. Please continue to support us in 2023 as we move on to Oceania!