Submitted by Kevin McElroy, who says:
I was recently reading the Wikipedia article about the Servizio Ferroviario Metropolitano (Metropolitan Railway Service) for Bologna, Italy and a user-uploaded map of the system is drastically better than the official map. You should check it out and see if you might want to do a map review on it.
The strange thing is that the logo and branding for the service is actually a pleasant design but the official map is just a mess.
Transit Maps says:
Let’s cover the official map first; we’ll get to the one from Wikipedia later.
Bologna’s SFM is an interesting hybrid rail system nearing completion that seems like it will act like a Metro within the city (lots of stations spaced closely together) and more like commuter – or even regional – rail the further out it goes. Modena is 50 kilometres (30 miles) away by road, and Poretta Terme even more distant. In that respect, it seems to have something in common with the Metro system of Valencia, Spain… now if only the map was as good!
The map has the stark, angular form that seems to be favoured by Italian Metro systems (Milan’s map comes to mind immediately), but it’s just not very well done. It can’t seem to decide whether it’s diagrammatic or geographical in nature and ends up failing at both.
The long route lines to the south wiggle around in a very unconvincing fashion, with some horribly uneven spacing between stations. Meanwhile, to the west, Vignola is shown as being much further our from Bologna than Modena, when the opposite is true in real life. I’d prefer to see tightly but evenly spaced stations within the city limits (which could be delineated with shading or similar), and wider spaced stations for the “commuter” part of the journey, reinforcing the dual nature of the system. Better indication of the relative locations of the route termini would be necessary as well.
A couple of other bugbears that I hate to see: station ticks that sit directly on the point where a route line changes direction (ugly!), and route lines that change direction with an acute angle like the S2(A) line does south of Casalecchio Garabaldi station. If it looks like a train has to reverse to get around a bend on your map, then you’re doing it wrong! Smoothing out the angle with a curve can mitigate this problem, but that wouldn’t quite work with the angular aesthetic of this particular map.
Our rating: Kevin’s right about the branding looking much better than the actual map. A chance wasted to make this new network look super amazing and awesome right from the start. Two stars.
Source: SFM Bologna web site