Tell Us About Yourself
I’m a cartographer, geospatial scientist and educator in the San Francisco Bay Area. I work on the mapping team at the California Coastal Commision. On the side, I teach GIS courses at the University of San Francisco and help run BayGeo, a local non-profit organization focused on GIS education and training. My past job was for the World Health Organization as a cartographer and GIS trainer. I’ve also been in GIS roles with the Alameda County Food Bank, Facebook (before it was Meta), and the Institute for Transportation Studies. I’ve published maps on a variety of topics – housing, food insecurity, transportation, public health, roadkill, and pizza.
Tell us the story behind your map (what inspired you to make it, what did you learn while making it, or any other aspects of the map or its creation you would like people to know)
I take the ferry across the San Francisco Bay all the time. The ferry services in the Bay Area are awesome – such an enjoyable way to get around! I commute to work from Alameda Seaplane terminal to the San Francisco Ferry Building, and often take the short hop or water shuttle to go between Alameda and Oakland. I was looking for a reason to make a map of the ferry service, and here it was!
My favorite part of this map was using color blending and the overlapping points to communicate different ferry schedules and routes.
Tell is about the Tools, data, etc., that you used to make the map
SF Bay Ferry provides GTFS data, including real-time vessel locations. This makes accessing the ferry routes and locations data super easy. Shoutout to SF Bay Ferry for making this data public and easily accessible! The other major ferry company in the bay is called Golden Gate Ferry, which operates routes between SF and Marin County. I couldn’t find vessel location data for Golden Gate Ferry (boo!) so I just added those routes as purple dashed lines on the map.
I collected real-time locations with an R script for a couple weeks, being sure to capture days with the different ferry schedules and some days with the special stadium service for Giants and Warriors games. Then I used QGIS to make a funky map of the locations.
At first, I turned the vessel location points into route lines, but after experimenting I found the scatterplot look of the points made for a more interesting map. I played around with color blending in order to show more information about the various services using color.
Just for fun, attached is a GIF of all the drafts I made for this map in the process of creating it. It was fun playing around with the layout, multiple map frames, and colors to try and best visualize how all the boats zip around the bay.