Submitted by Fabian Wegewijs, Coordinator of Travel Information for U-OV, who says:

In 2018 a new streetcar will run between the Central Station of Utrecht and the university area of Utrecht (De Uithof). This Uithoflijn will have 7 intermediate stops, and its termini will be the Central Station on one end and a major park + ride on the other. Twenty seven new trams have been ordered from CAF, the first of which has arrived at the depot in Nieuwegein in December 2016 for testing. All vehicles will be 32 meters long. During daytime they’ll run coupled, with a total capacity of some 550 passengers per run. We’ll provide a frequency of 16 runs per hour, creating a capacity of almost 9.000 passengers per hour in each direction.

For this new line we’ve made a strip map. One will be placed above every other door in the vehicles, alternating with our house rules. Icons show some information about each stop. We’ve followed your often repeated advice to place the stop names horizontal, to make them easy to read. The colours (red and orange) at the lines termini are shown on all U-OV transit information, including stop signs, brochures, digital information screens and the vehicles destination display. With this system people can see by colour (eight in total) which way the tram or bus is going, or they can (intuitively) filter out all lines that do not go in their direction.

I’m very curious as to what you think of this map.

Transit Maps says:

As always, I love getting maps directly from transit agencies for review, so thanks to Fabian for sending another map my way! This is a solid, no-nonsense strip map here: no bells and whistles, just clear communication of information.

The use of colour to quickly and visually denote the tram’s final destination is interesting (U-OV’s site explains this here in Dutch), though I do wonder why it doesn’t carry across to the directional arrows at the bottom of the map? It seems like the “Centrum” arrow and text could be red and the “De Uithof” arrow and text could be in the same shade of orange as the label on the map. If the arrows are meant to stand alone, then perhaps grey would work better than a non-committal colour.

My only other comment is in regard to the “hospital” and “park-and-ride” icons, which exhibit something I’m seeing a bit more of lately – a curious need to place an icon in a shape that’s inside another shape. The “H” for “hospital” is in a rounded-edge box which sits inside another box (which just seems unnecessarily recursive to me), while the “P+R” is in a circle in a box. Both would be graphically simpler if the symbol sat within one shape only, and the P+R icon could even just be a circle to quickly visually differentiate it from the other “destination” icons. The icons do their job as they are, but I always think that simpler is better for this kind of thing.

Our rating: Solid work that fits within an overall wayfinding strategy without being spectacular. Three stars.