The Metro Rail System compared to Rhode Island, and other places around the world.

Hi all,

A couple months ago, I saw the post by u/lbutler1234, “The A line overlayed Rhode Island”. It’s a fun comparison! I thought it might be interesting if I made a similar overlay.

I used ESRI’s ArcGIS to process the data and create the overlay images. The data is from Metro’s Open Data Portal, although the data is a bit out of date, so I had to add the recent A line extension to Pomona manually, along with some other fixes. OpenStreetMap and ESRI provided the background maps and satellite imagery, respectively.

First, I tried to recreate the original overlay of Rhode Island using the same alignment, then made another that tried to line up downtown Los Angeles and downtown Providence. I then decided to make a few more overlays for other cities around the world that I thought might be interesting, specifically: New York (with two variants, one aligning the A line into Long Island and the other in normal alignment), Luxembourg, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Monaco. All images should be at the same scale, and admittedly they’re still a bit rough. Nevertheless, I figured it’d be fun to share them all here.