Submitted by Maxwell Robb, who says

I saw this map last year in Hoboken Station in NJ. I was rather shocked, I’ve never really seen a bus map quite like it. It appears that NJ Transit has made them for every county. I’m curious about your thoughts.

Transit Maps says:

I’ve seen these NJ Transit bus maps a few times over the years, and I’ve never really been impressed by them. For me, the colours have always seemed very muddy and strangely difficult to distinguish from each other. I wondered whether it was to aid colour-blind users, but a quick visit to the proofing mode in Photoshop shoots that down – the blue and purple end up looking extremely similar for such users. Finally, it dawned on me that the three colours – orange, purple and blue – are seemingly used simply because they’re in the agency’s logo… which isn’t necessarily a great criterion for selecting colour palettes for a map.

The actual mapping isn’t that great either: the different municipalities within the county are simplified to the most basic shapes, but the routes twist and tangle their way across the map in a very convoluted way. It’s just about okay in the less complex southern and western parts of the map, but the north and eastern parts of the map are an awful mess. That afore-mentioned low contrast between the route colours doesn’t help matters, either. Lots of tiny route numbers and callout boxes add to the chaos. There’s some rail services buried way at the bottom of all of this as well, but good luck working with those.

Our rating: There’s no doubt that NJ Transit is an unenviable position – their network basically covers the entire state, and finding an effective way of representing that in a cohesive and attractive manner across a number of county maps is a Herculean task. I do applaud them for trying something a little out of the box, but I just don’t think it really works as it stands. A rethink of the colour palette to provide contrast between adjacent route lines and even more simplification of the routes could help. 2 stars.