Submitted by Tiago, who says:

Here’s the official bus map of Leiria, a small Portuguese city with around 50,000 people living inside its urban perimeter.

In my opinion, this map is a mess and completely useless since I was never able to use it while riding the bus. Although it gives us an idea of the lines, it has too little information and it’s too confusing.

What do you think?

Transit Maps says:

I’m with you, Tiago – this really isn’t very useful at all. Rather than having any sense of scale or how the network physically relates to the geography of the city, it’s just an overly stylised and simplistic overview map. In a way, it comes across more as a decorative illustration than a map – pretty, but not actually functional.

The version on the agency’s website is “interactive” in that each line highlights as you mouse over it (with the others fading down), but even that’s only slightly useful. Clicking on a line takes you to the relevant schedule page, which is nice. However, the schedules themselves are also over-designed and not immediately intuitive… everything is just harder work than it should be.

On the positive side, the icons used to indicate points of interest are generally clear and easily understandable, though I’d like some consistency on the bug bus icon used to indicate interurban bus service… only one of them has an indication of where these buses actually go. Again, really useful stuff to know! The “blobby dot” station tick is an interesting approach I haven’t seen before – it certainly fits with the style of the map.

Our final word: Simple, bright, colorful… and not really very useful. Definitely an example of form over function that can only serve as a very simplistic overview of the network.

Source: Mobilis Leiria website