My Metro pipe dreams (Image courtesy of MetroMapMaker.com)

If you use public transportation in D.C. (or anywhere, really) you’ve probably fantasized about how to improve its layout. Perhaps adding a stop in Georgetown or Ivy City, or the inclusion of express tracks so riders could get from the outskirts of the system to the heart of the city with fewer stops in between, would make the system more convenient.

Or, maybe, you know that you’d come up with some great ideas if only you could futz around with the map a bit: add a station here, lay down some new tracks over there, like Sim WMATA. Now, a new website lets you do just that.

Metro Map Maker provides users with the digital tools to recreate the WMATA system to whatever specification their hearts desire. A Teal Line that resembles the London Tube’s Circle Line is a click away. Sick of Metro Center? Toggle over to the eraser and the station disappears.

Shannon Turner, the developer who created the website, said she was inspired by a Wired article about people who’ve mapped out utopian versions of their public transit system. But when Turner downloaded a Metro map to Photoshop to create her own, “it was just taking forever.”

That’s when she decided to use her skills and make website that would help her, and others, design a system with ease. She says it took about a month of working in her spare time to complete the project, which went live on Tuesday.

The first thing visitors see when entering the site is a grid, like graph paper. They add a Metro map, or a Metro map that also includes the forthcoming Purple Line (which is a Maryland Transit Administration project) as a template, or they can start from scratch.

“It’s been pretty cool just seeing people from all different cities enjoying using it,” says Turner. “The defaults are D.C.-specific, but I don’t want this to be just for D.C. I think it would be really cool to build out maps for any kind of city.”

One aspect of the site is how easy it is to download and share the maps, or to collaborate with friends on building them.

The sharing doesn’t stop with the finished maps. As the founder of Hear Me Code, a series of free, beginner-friendly coding classes for women, she wants to make sure that interested folks can see how she built the site, so she’s made the code public.

And even if my Teal Circle Line is nothing more than a pipe dream, Turner says that’s part of the point.

“I’m really drawn to speculative fiction because it helps you imagine what tomorrow might be,” she says. “I like to think about a brighter tomorrow. With tools like this, my ultimate goal is to help change the relationship between how people use public transit and start thinking about how it can be better.”