Okay, my head is officially reeling here. Try as I might, I can barely make any sense at all of this fare zone map from Austria’s Verkehrsverbund Ost-Region, the transport association that handles rail and bus transit in Eastern Austria (in effect, the Greater Vienna area).

I get that there are eight concentric zone rings radiating out from Vienna, each of which is broken up into smaller zone areas, but after that…

There just seems to be so many exceptions to the zones as to make the system impossible to understand. There are multiple extensions from one zone from another along rail lines, and also the ever-so-helpfully named “Zone Conflicts”, where multiple zones could apply depending on where you’re coming from and where you’re going to (shown by hatching in the colours of all the competing zones).

Add to the that the rather frenetic indication of bus routes (like a big scribble all over the map) and the incredible amount of labelling just about everywhere, and it’s all a bit of a confusing mess to me, unfortunately.

Unless readers from Austria can tell me that they use this map regularly and actually find it useful in their trip planning, I’m going to have to give this one star. Getting around by transit shouldn’t be this obtuse.

Source: Offical VOR website