Subways
Subways
Subways of North America [A subway-line style (bold colored, 45-degree aligned lines with white bars indicating stations) map has been constructed by combining and linking various parts of the subway maps from many different cities, as if all of the transit systems were connected directly. The cities include (from top to bottom, left to right) Vancouver, Montreal, San Francisco, Toronto, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, Miami, Atlanta, Monterrey, San Juan, Santo Domingo, and Mexico City.]

The comic shows the maps of all North American subway networks. In reality, none of these systems are interconnected, but in the diagram subways from different cities that have the same color on the official subway map have whimsically named connections, such as the "Ohio-California Tunnel" connecting the Green Lines of Cleveland and Los Angeles, or the "Rocky Mountain Tunnel" connecting the Blue Lines of Chicago and San Francisco. Vancouver and San Francisco are connected through a station called Richmond, which appears to double as Richmond, British Columbia and Richmond, California . The "Springfield Monorail" is fictional, from the animated series The Simpsons (see Marge vs. the Monorail ), but its approximate location on this map would suggest the Seattle Monorail , or perhaps Springfield, Oregon, which Matt Groening revealed was the inspiration for the  Simpsons' hometown .
The Urban Mass Transit Systems of North America map (right) created by Yale Professor Bill Rankin on his web site Radical Cartography in 2006 presents all of the subway systems in North America at the same scale using geographic, instead of topological, layout.
The networks on xkcd's map are displayed with absolutely no consideration to geographic position, in order to connect like-colored routes together. While Vancouver is the most North-West, Mexico City being the most South, and San Francisco the most west, distances are not accurate (in reality, Vancouver is closer to Chicago than to Toronto for example) and cities are often arranged in the wrong direction from one another:
The map's design is modeled after the system map of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority in Boston where Randall is from.
Not all cities with a subway are shown on the map. Missing from the map:
Subways of North America [A subway-line style (bold colored, 45-degree aligned lines with white bars indicating stations) map has been constructed by combining and linking various parts of the subway maps from many different cities, as if all of the transit systems were connected directly. The cities include (from top to bottom, left to right) Vancouver, Montreal, San Francisco, Toronto, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, Miami, Atlanta, Monterrey, San Juan, Santo Domingo, and Mexico City.]
