Suggested by Ricardo Tróstel on Twitter.

This is an example of a map that should be pretty simple and straightforward, but the designers have made a lot of baffling decisions along the way that work really hard to sabotage it from the inside.

For starters, the Biotrén network has two lines, but the map doesn’t indicate where either begins or ends. For the record, Line 1 runs from Mercado to Hualqui and Line 2 runs from Coronel to the main hub station at Concepción, but good luck working that out.

The stations are all colour-coded according to the municipality that they’re in, which isn’t really my thing, but it works acceptably and does add a welcome dash of colour to the map. However, the boxes are all the same size, regardless of the length of the the name… which means that “Cardenal Raúl Silva Henríquez” station has to be both abbreviated and labelled in a much smaller font size to fit. Other labels are also crammed into their boxes, though not to such a drastic degree. It all makes for a somewhat chaotic look. I’d think that colour-coding the station dots and having plain black text labels – all set at the same size – would work a lot better.

The most baffling design decision made, however, is the choice to place the whole map on a blue background that precisely matches the colour used to represent the Bió Bió River… making it look for all the world that the greater Concepción area exists on two large islands in the middle of an ocean. Really quite bizarre.

Our rating: It’s hard to screw up a system map that consists of just two routes, but this one tries really hard to do just that. Still usable… but only just. One star.