Submission – Official Map: GoBus Ohio, 2024

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Submitted by Leo, who says:

The state-supported GoBus system in Ohio has a somewhat strange route scheme (e.g. no direct route from Columbus to Cleveland, or Columbus to Cincinnati via Dayton) but their map, despite being overall fairly poor, makes some interesting stylistic choices. The treatment of destinations served by some trips by showing each trip as an individual line, as well as of major cities/hubs where multiple stops are often made, is certainly interesting. Curious to hear your thoughts!

Transit Maps says:

While this simple little map isn’t going to win any awards, Leo is right when he says it has some interest. Encoding the number of trips each route makes on a daily basis into the map itself is pretty clever, and allows you to quickly see that Route A makes three (round-trip) journeys a day from Columbus to Athens, but only one of them continues on to also serve Parkersburg, for example. It can also be seen that the two trips between Parkersburg and Cleveland have distinctly different stopping patterns.

The rings around the terminal stops do seem to serve a purpose by indicating stops in the periphery of the main centres, but perhaps it’s a little confusing at Wooster, where it makes it look like the route loops around the city and returns back to Columbus by a different route (in reality, there’s two different round-trip routes that serve different towns on the way).

Our final word: Simple and somewhat generic in style, but has an interesting concept that encodes frequency and route variations directly into the map. Interesting!

Source: GoBus Ohio website

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