I noticed a spike in my web stats coming from the Curbed Atlanta website over the last couple of days… so I traced them back to this interesting map of a hypothetical future Atlanta. It turns out that the hits to my site were because one commenter had volunteered the map to my “Hall of Shame”, complete with a link. Ouch. 

Now, while I don’t think that the map is anywhere near awful enough to enter those un-hallowed halls, I do have some problems with it design-wise. Because the map is based almost slavishly on the current official map, it has an incredibly dense centre but vast expanses of open space toward the outer edges of the map. The middle therefore becomes an almost illegible tangle of route lines, icons and station labels – so much so that I actually see very little value in adding the myriad streetcar routes that Jason shows, because it’s just too hard to work out what’s going on. 

As is often the case with a diagrammatic map of a complex system, the central part of the map needs to be expanded to allow more breathing room, while the edges can be condensed to reduce wasted space. It’s unreasonable to expect a design – one that currently only has to show Atlanta’s relatively simple MARTA system – to continue to function well under all the extra visual burden of this extensive multi-modal future.

Our rating: What works for the goose doesn’t always work for the gander – too much information crammed into a framework that was never really designed for it. An interesting look at Atlanta’s potential transit future, but needs some extensive reworking in my eyes. Two stars.

Source: Curbed Atlanta (read the comments for some insight from Jason on the design)