I love my Thomas Guide. I bought one in Barstow during my drive from Boston to West Hollywood two years ago. Compared to its Boston equivalent (the Arrow Metro Boston guide), it's a feat of engineering and subtle history.

My complaint with Vignetti's classic map (and even with its subtle victory as the Weekender map on the MTA web site) is similar to everyone else's: lack of context. Nevertheless he created the new paradigm, one we still consider vital to transit maps: marking lines as trunks and station features with obvious clarity, use of non-serifed but bold fonts to make reading easy at a distance, use of the IND's clear delineation of local (double-letter), express (single-letter), and rush hour (diamond instead of circle) identifiers throughout a purposefully redundant system.

He was rebelling against the horrible maps of the 1950s and 1960s, which used curves and only three colors to convey information poorly and still based on "this is IRT, this is BMT, this is IND". If you haven't seen those maps, here is an example from just after the 1964 World's Fair.

Also his original map had gaudy, non-contextual choices for colors. We can be grateful he had to modify even before being dropped.

Mapmaking is an evolving process. The move from hot wax and Letraset to desktop publishing via computer to scalable graphics that never get printed has been dramatic. Suddenly we can have every layer of a real-time map, then decide which levels we need, then again decide what gets lost in which level (because we can never convey everything or nothing becomes important enough to convey).

By the way, are you still here in LA?