Submitted by Lachlan, who says:

Brisbane dropped a new transit map and it is EXTREMELY pretty. I’m a big fan. Definitely the best-designed official transit map in Australia in my opinion. It even acknowledges the rapid bus routes and the G-Link light rail! I wish it could have acknowledged the existence of the ferries but that would probably require that the city centre become even more distorted…

… and also submitted by Michael, who says:

The new official South East Queensland map feels like a significant improvement on the last one, as low a bar as that may be. The CBD area is a lot less cluttered in spite of the inclusion of the upcoming cross-river-rail and some additional bus routes on the map. The dark-mode map may be an acquired taste but overall I feel it’s much more readable than any of the previous efforts.

(Also suggested as a map to review by numerous other Australian readers – thanks to all of you!)

Transit Maps says:

Yes, this is certainly a massive improvement on the tired and stale old designs for the SEQ rail diagram, last reviewed on the blog way back in 2014. I’d probably stop short of calling it amazing, because there’s a few odd design decisions that hold it back a bit.

But there’s also a lot of things it does well, not the least of which is finding a good balance between the massive sprawling nature of the entire network and the need to expand the central part of the diagram for clarity. Despite the addition of multiple busway routes and the planned Cross River Rail lines, the central section is presented far more clearly than ever before. The “under construction” dashes on the Cross River Rail lines are beautifully executed – these are often an afterthought, so it’s nice to see them get some love here. And overall, the diagram feels nicely balanced, though I feel a more rigorous vertical grid could have been employed to ensure that the vertical distance between station labels was totally consistent across the whole map outside of the expanded central area – there’s just enough variance to be noticeable.

The numbed bullets for the (select few) bus lines are nicely employed and help mitigate the fact that the line colours aren’t really very colour-blind friendly: all the bus lines coming in from the south-east are on the “warm” side of the spectrum and have very little contrast when run through a colour-blindness simulator.

Of course, the use of numbered bullets for the bus lines begs the question why lettered or numbered bullets aren’t used for the rail lines. It’s generally considered best practice to identify rail lines in this manner on a map or diagram for easy reference and more and more networks around the world are doing it – Los Angeles completely reworked its line names and letters recently, for example. The empty coloured rings just seem like a huge missed opportunity to me. Perhaps this is something that could be considered when the Cross River Rail is finished and all the lines take on a more permanent configuration.

While it’s great to see the G-Link tram line on the map, I find the line style for it (thin dashes on either side of a solid stroke, even on the identifying ring symbol!) to be very unconvincing. Perhaps a simpler cased line could have worked better?

The black background is very dramatic and stylish, but it also works against the diagram a bit. The very thin bus route lines have trouble standing out against it, as do most of the station labels, which are fairly lightweight and small. It’s often a good idea to bump small text up to the next available weight when reversing it out of a dark background, and there are even some fonts, like FF Transit, that have “negative” versions that are optically adapted for this use. However, this map uses Arial (yes, seriously) for its labels, so the next weight up is Arial Bold, which is way too BOLD.

Our final word: Not perfect, but a massive, massive improvement on what came before it. Hopefully, this gets tweaked and perfected by the time the Cross River Rail lines open, and then it may very well be “the best-designed official transit map in Australia”, like Lachlan says.