Submitted by Kevin McElroy, who says:
The Rome Metro has only had 2 lines for quite sometime. For such a famous European capital the metro system is pretty simple. Metro C is a new line opened in the southeastern portion of the city and extends out into the periphery. It is planned to eventually cross the historic center, though for now isn’t all funded.
They updated the Metro map with lines, A, B, B1 (a spur in the northwestern part of the city, which opened in 2012), and C. In addition they included trams, metro-like services (Roma Lido, Roma Viterbo, Roma Giardinetti), and regional rail connections (“commuter rail” 30 minute headways).
Overall, I think the map does a good job of showing the different services and helps you understand their utility in the overall network. I think the details and design of the map are much improved and show some real thought was given to how best display the network for the metropolitan region of Rome. Everything seems cohesive from fonts, colors, to weights and text orientation.
I’m going to assume you won’t like the the large circle (GRA, a large highway ring road) which may not mean much to a tourist, but to an Italian it really gives a good idea of geography.
Transit Maps says:
Surprisingly, I’ve never featured a full system map from Rome before, only bits and pieces from different parts of the network (#rome). So it’s a real pleasure to see how excellent this new version is.
I have no problems with the inclusion of the ring road at all: its perfectly circular shape is very visually pleasing, and it gives a good sense of scale to the whole map.
Informational hierarchy is good, although I’d perhaps like to see the Metro lines thickened up just a tad to help them stand out a little more, especially in the busier parts of the map. If there’s one minor concern with the map, it’s that the right-hand side seems a little crowded in comparison to the left, with much tighter station spacing. This seems to reflect the real world situation (Termini station really is slap-bang in the middle of the ring road’s circle), but a little bit of tweaking and nudging could perhaps have created a little more space on that right hand side. Things will get a little better when the superseded stations on the Roma Giardinetti line are removed entirely, instead of being struck through as they are now.
One glaring set of errors in the legend: the coloured boxes behind the urban railroad and regional railroad names are too far to the right, cutting off the first letter of those names: “ROMA” becomes “OMA”, and “FL1″ is just “L1″. On the map, FL6′s route line doesn’t have the dashes in it that other regional lines have to indicate that their final destinations are off the edge of the map.
Our rating: Despite the few flaws noted above, this is a superbly confident map that almost feels more German in style and execution than Italian. Really quite excellent: four stars.
Source: Official ATAC website