Submitted by Michael, who says:

My university redid the branding of their shuttle service recently, officially called the BUS (Brown University Shuttle) but called just “the shuttle” by students. They color-coded the bus lines and put up new signs. The only thing the signs are missing, though, is a map. I took it upon myself to make one.

Because distances between stops are fairly short, having some streets and greens was important to help orient users. Another thing I struggled with was elegantly showing direction of travel. The arrow system looks fine, but I’m wondering if it’s clear enough.

One important thing to note is that the green and yellow lines only run during the day (for university employees/medical students to get between the main East Side campus and the Jewelry District site), and the purple and blue lines only run at night (for undergraduates to get around campus safely, quickly, and warmly). In fact, I think that the transport operator subcontractor may just switch the shuttles on the yellow/green lines to the blue/purple lines right at 7pm to avoid a trip back to the shuttle depot.

At a first glance of the map, it might seem like all the lines run simultaneously. I included the legend in an attempt to prevent this, but I’m not sure it’s enough. Do you know of a more intuitive, visual way to convey this information? Or is making two separate maps just the way to go?

Transit Maps says:

First off – nice work on this map, Michael! It’s very clean and simple, but with enough geographical detail to orient users, especially the campus greens. It does what it needs to do very efficiently. I think the arrows are fine, though you could experiment with a couple of alternatives to see if anything works that little bit better.

As for differentiating the daytime and nighttime routes, I think it would be weird to have two separate maps when they would only show two routes each. The colours do some of the work for you in that yellow and green are brighter, more “day-like” colours, while the purple and blue are colder, darker “night” shades. You could present the evening lines as dashed routes (or some other immediately obvious difference), but after some thought, I believe the simplest option is to just make your legend more explicitly obvious. A big heading that says “Daytime Routes, Monday to Friday, 7am–7pm” with the green and yellow routes underneath it, then another big heading that says “Evening Routes, Monday to Sunday, 7pm–late” with the information for the purple and blue lines following. Don’t make your readers search all four routes to find that information, present it up front. Hope this helps a bit!