Picture this: All the Taco Bell restaurants in your city, connected by a subway system. A dream come true, right? While society hasn’t quite gotten there yet, lucky for us, one genius has fed our fantasies into what a Taco Bell subway system would actually look like.
Meet Jeff McGough, a 16-year-old high school student from Minnesota. He loves geography, cartography, and you guessed it – Taco Bell. Jeff brilliantly found a way to incorporate all of his passions into one project by creating Taco Bell subway maps that he uploads to Reddit. For multiple cities, you can see where Jeff puts actual Taco Bell restaurants and connects them by a conceptual subway system.
“Even if my maps are just a fun experiment, it still gives me an opportunity to compare my fictional transit systems to real transit systems communities already have in place,” said Jeff. He further explained that Taco Bell was a great choice for his maps because not only does he go there every week, but Taco Bell restaurants are located in a wide variety of places - in large cities, small suburbs, and near highways. This gives him the opportunity to create conceptual lines that reach out to diverse areas of cities - just like real subway systems do.
So how did Jeff get into creating these maps? Well, it all started off as a fun experiment – and a little inspiration from a subreddit called r/subwaysubway. Jeff explains, “Users create maps of what it would look like if various restaurant chains connected their locations with subway lines.”
Jeff told us, “Besides just being a fun way to spend my free time, I would say my main goal in making maps is to spark conversation, especially in the realm of mass transit.”
Looking ahead, Jeff would love to pursue civil engineering or urban planning. He tells us, “like my maps, I'm open to anything. I love creating, and anything that allows me to do that is something I'm open to pursuing.”
If you’d like to follow Jeff’s subway systems, he has an instagram called @mcgoughmaps, or you can check out the Reddit community that started it all called r/subwaysubway.