Submitted by the author, who says:

Dear Cameron,

You’ll be happy to hear that my Luxembourg map is having a beneficial influence on the neighbouring communities. U-OV, the company operating buses and trams in Utrecht, Netherlands, recently commissioned me to build a new map for Utrecht based on the previous Luxembourg experience.

This gave me the opportunity to explore all concepts further and since this week the new map is official and live 🙂

Here are the main features:

• The city center where distances are on a walking scale and the De Uuithof University area are represented geographically whereas the periphery is schematized but topologically accurate.
• Line frequency is shown on a simple binary mode: thick line = high frequency / thin line = low frequency
• In order to make the complex bus network understandable I have split it into 5 sub-networks with one color assigned to each namely:
   – Lines that go through the center (Purple)
   – Lines that terminate at Utrecht Central Station (Green)
   – Lines serving De Uithof University center in the East (Orange)
   – Tangent lines (Brown)
   – Local lines (Pink)
• Train lines are blue, and tram lines are yellow
• All angles are multiples of 30°, this corresponds closely to the urban layout
• Some nice landmarks help orientation

You can see the map and design notes on my website here, and on the official U-OV website here. I’m really happy with the result, the map has a unique character and gives an intuitive feel of the city and its layout.

Transit Maps says:

Looks like Jug’s mission to improve the transit maps of Europe (and beyond!) one-by-one is continuing! This is another lovely piece of design, and is an obvious stylistic extension of his previous sterling work on the Luxembourg bus map (June 2015 for his initial version, March 2016 for the official version).

Like that map, the historical centre is rendered fairly faithfully here, while the outlying areas are rendered more schematically. The extra complexity and size of the multiple networks shown here means that the usefulness of the geographical parts of the map is limited – it gives you an idea of the lay of the land, but wouldn’t help very much for walking around the historical core of the town, for example. The sheer number of bus routes (I count around 40 or so) converging at the main railway station means that their route numbers have to be printed quite small, but it looks like they’re still legible enough. I’m hoping that the posters are printed nice and big, though!

I do like the added flexibility that 30-degree angles give to the layout, and I especially like how the main train line cuts a dead straight diagonal slash through the map: a lovely compositional axis. If you look towards the bottom right, you can see the town of Houten, whose bicycle network map we’ve featured previously on Transit Maps. Its historical Castellum district is rendered perfectly as a neat little pentagon; a lovely touch. The simple binary frequency legend (thick = frequent, thin = less frequent) is simple and intuitive. 

The colours that Jug has used are interesting, to say the least. The dark blue for the train lines establishes them at the top at the information hierarchy, while the cased yellow for the tram lines sets them nicely apart from the bus lines. Orange, purple, brown, pink and grass green are less conventional choices for the bus lines but it does make the map look strikingly different in a world dominated by primary-hued transit maps. The colours also seem to work relatively well when I put the map through Photoshop’s colour-blindness simulations, so that’s a plus. I’d venture that the overall colour palette is perhaps not to everyone’s taste, though it’s growing on me.

If you click through to Jug’s website, be sure to scroll down to the bottom for a detailed look at the design theory behind the redesign of this map. I’ve reproduced a couple of examples above: the first clearly shows how geographical maps of regional transit can waste a lot of space showing very little information, while the second shows how Jug has maintained the relative position of all the localities on the map, even as he’s simplified and stylised the layout. It’s all great stuff, and I highly recommend reading it all.

Our rating: More great work from one of Europe’s most singular mapping talents. Which city is next on his hit list, I wonder? Four stars.