Submitted by Orange, who says:

I’ve been browsing the maps you have about my city, Madrid, and I noticed the map you have for the Renfe Cercanías network, the commuter rail in Madrid, is not up-to-date. The changes aren’t huge, but the network does operate under substantially different patterns. I would really appreciate it if you took some time to check out the most modern version of the diagram.

Transit Maps says:

It has been a while since we looked in on Madrid’s commuter rail diagram (see the previous review from June 2013 here), but I’m not really enamoured of this new version at all – for a few reasons, not all of which are design-related.

First things first – this diagram is sloppy and messily drawn. The gap between adjacent route lines is wildly variable (check out the C-1 and C-7 lines as they round the bend south of Principe Pio station), and the fussy jogs in the lines through Sol and Méndez Alvaro stations just look awful and amateurish. There are better approaches to depicting these stations than these half-baked attempts if just a little thought was to be applied.

I find the zone boundaries are even more busy and distracting than they were before, as the contrast between the alternating zones has been increased – they really do come across as zebra stripes now. There has to be a way to either radically simplify the shapes of the zones or forego them in favour of a zone designation label at each station, because this approach is now bordering on the absurd.

The thinner route lines and standardised station markers unfortunately make this diagram considerably more generic that the older map. While that map shares some of the same problems that this new one has, its unique design style compensated for those flaws quite a bit.

The non-design related problem with this diagram? The fact that this tiny 1200-pixel wide PNG of it is the only available version of it on Renfe’s website – no PDF or even a higher-resolution image. Much of the smaller detail is difficult to make out and I wish you luck trying to read the legend at all! Delivering passenger information like this in 2022 is completely unacceptable and really needs to be looked at – and not just by Renfe, as plenty of other transit agencies still use raster images that are too small or overly compressed on their websites.

Our final word: Urgh. A huge backwards step in this diagram’s evolution. Poorly drawn and delivered.

Source: Renfe website