Submitted by scsj, who says:
Metrorail in Gauteng (Johannesburg/Pretoria/Soweto/Germiston), South Africa. I don’t know, I find this map monumentally confusing. There are way too many colors and none of the lines have names, there’s no scale or anything to indicate location other than station names, it’s so cramped, and it sacrifices too much geographic accuracy for the sake of the design – for example, the offshoot of the dark blue line between Johannesburg Park and Pretoria is actually west of the main part of the line, not east. And why is the spacing mostly uniform everywhere except the Centurion and Midrand Gautrain stations?
The interesting thing is that Gautrain is among the best, most user-friendly transit systems I’ve ever used. I haven’t used Metrorail in Gauteng, but I have used it in Cape Town, and the quality is much lower. Gautrain is aimed at upper and middle class suburbanites whereas Metrorail is aimed at the working class, who by and large commute in from the far-flung townships they were forced into under apartheid.
Transit Maps says:
It’s pretty hard to disagree with this summary: this really is a pretty dismal effort of a map. The most ridiculous part has to be the naming of all eleven route lines in the legend as just “MetroRail Line”, not as destinations or even route colours. Absolutely and astonishingly useless.
The other main problem is the lack of any semblance of geography or scale. This system is huge and sprawling: it covers an area around 150 km tall by 120 km wide (90 x 75 miles), but you’d never know it from this map. As an example, Nasrec station is less than 10 km away from Johannesburg Park Station, and over 60 km from the southernmost station, Vereeniging – yet here they seem almost equidistant. While I understand that this is a diagrammatic representation of the system, some concession to showing the distances a traveller can expect to cover needs to be made.
Colour choices are generally hideous as well: cyan interchange markers clash with almost every line they cross, and we also have retina-searing magenta and yellow “Business Express” markers just to make sure no colour feels left out.
Finally, absolutely every single station label is set at an angle – and in all four possible 45-degree orientations as well: Erik Spierkermann would have an absolute fit if he ever looked at this map.
Our rating: Technically, it’s actually drawn quite well – no errors, consistently drawn lines, no-nonsense sans serif typeface (some variant of DIN?) – but the end result still manages to be quite dire. 1.5 stars.
Source: Official Metrorail website – PDF link