QHi, I want to make a map of my home city’s bus system, but as I am a ‘starter’ I have some problems with developing it. In our city centre, there is one bus stop with 24 routes and another with 22 (excluding the night routes). Between these two stops, the lines run along two streets with 10 and 11 routes , respectively. What would you advise me to do to not have a big mess in the middle of the map? I’d really appreciate an answer.

A That’s quite a problem, Anonymous, and probably one that’s not able to be resolved in a way that gives you an attractive, usable map: it’s just too many routes in a confined space to be practicable. For an example of how terrible your map might look, check out the old bus map for Luxembourg City before Jug Cerovic made a far superior one for them. You simply can’t run that number of bus routes in parallel with each other and expect your map to work.

So you need to think of a way to group like services together on your map to reduce the number of route lines passing through your densest area. This can be by service type (local, express, limited, long-distance) or by destination (buses to the north as one group, buses to the south as another, etc.). For good examples of this type of map, check out the current Luxembourg City bus map and the new Utrecht bus map (both by Jug Cerovic) which group routes by destination, and the bus map for Spokane, Washington by CHK America, which groups by service type. The new Muni map for San Francisco (which I haven’t actually written about on the blog) is also a great example of mapping a bus network in a modern style.

Hope this gets you started!