Submitted by Jug (who you may remember for his INAT series of standardised transit maps), who says:
Hi Cameron, 3 weeks ago you posted an article about the Luxembourg bus map (May 2015, 1 star). I was curious to see if that Gordian Knot could be disentangled and started working on it. Anyway when I succeeded and managed to understand how the system actually works I couldn’t help but redesign it altogether. You can see the map and some design process explanations on my website. I hope you will like it.
Transit Maps says:
Like it? I absolutely love it!
Jug’s reinvention of this map is nothing short of superb, and he deserves a lot of credit for taking the time to unravel the awful tangle of routes on the official map and turn it into something that both makes sense and looks beautiful.
He’s really done a fantastic job of reorganising and grouping everything so that the ridiculous number of routes along the main axis can be reduced to just five trunk routes, instead of the up to 20 seemingly random routes on the official map. This “trunk line” grouping also reduces the number of colours required to indicate all the routes, which definitely helps to create a simpler, cleaner look for the map.
The inclusion of the pentagon-shaped old city (which really does look much like that in real life) gives a nice focal point to the map, and this map certainly gives a much better sense of the city’s geography overall (although the outer edges are quite stylised and distorted). Another nice bonus is the inclusion of the rail lines that run through the city.
Stylistically, I think this map breaks free of some of the limitations of Jug’s previous INAT maps and actually reminds me greatly of this fantastic 1988 map of Amsterdam’s public transit by Hans van der Kooi.
Our rating: In just three weeks, Jug has created a map that’s not only far superior to the (admittedly terrible) original, but is also one of the nicest looking transit maps I’ve seen in quite a while. That’s no mean feat! Four-and-a-half stars!
Source: Jug’s website. I definitely recommend clicking through to look at the process work behind the creation of this map. It’s very instructive to see how Jug went about untangling and regrouping all the routes to make sense of them before redrawing the map as he wanted it to look.