Submitted by Kristofer Kåring, who says:
The “City Lines Bus Map” of the Libertas network in Dubrovnik (Croatia) is not one of the best network maps i have ever seen. It is geographically correct, I have to give them that, but a line for each direction of a route makes it messy where a lot of routes share the same road. And the use of a white arrow in a black dot for stops makes it even messier.
A side note: It is also not possible to find the difference between routes 1A, 1B and 1C on the map. Reading the timetable for each route, I can see that 1A takes the stops Mokosica 1, 2, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 2 while 1B takes Mokosica 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, and that does not make it any clearer to me. 1C is an even bigger mystery, because its route is not described anywhere.
Transit Maps says:
Posting this one for my sister-in-law, who is on vacation in Dubrovnik at this very moment. Fortunately, she and her husband have rented a car to get around Croatia, because this map is certainly not helping matters.
There’s really only eleven bus routes shown on the map, but it just looks like there’s so many more: a tangled web of lines that becomes almost impossible to follow at major intersections. The decision to show each direction of travel for all routes, even if they’re on the same physical street – disregarding decades of transit map wisdom that says that a route line always indicates bi-directional travel unless explicitly indicated otherwise – is just baffling, and almost doubles the amount of lines that need to be drawn. It also creates a proliferation of directional arrows/bus stops, which visually dominate the map.
Other problems abound. There’s a heavy-handed and overly dark drop shadow for the coastline, an unnecessary radial fill for the ocean, and an unexplained dashed line for Route 17 (Peak hour only? Weekends only? Summer only? Who knows!). The arrow for ferries leaving directly from the Old City points directly at the route numbers for regional buses heading south along the coast, which is bound to cause some confusion. Almost hilariously, the white squares used on the map to indicate hotels are shown in the legend as white… on a white background.
Our rating: Not good, not good at all. Hard to decipher and overly complex for such a small network. Half a star, and that’s only because I quite like the aerial photographic representation of the Old City.
Source: Libertas Dubrovnik official site