Submitted by Hubert, who says:

You really should review more ugly, messed up maps as they serve as deterrent examples. This eyesore of a map is what made me aware of the fact that transit map design is not as easy as it seems.

I once sat in line 7 and it took me twenty minutes to figure out whether the bus served the Elisabethkirche Station in my direction of travel. This is literally the worst transit map I’ve ever seen.

Transit Maps says:

It’s pretty hard to disagree with Hubert’s assessment of this map, which is a confusing, seething mass of route lines running at all sorts of random angles. Working out where some routes go in the central part of town is almost impossible, especially out of Elisabethkirche (as Hubert mentions), where some lines appear to head in both directions when they reach a T-junction just below that stop.

The labelling of suburbs/surrounding towns is poor: text badly aligned to heavy-handed grey boxes, which are jammed in wherever they’ll fit. The location of these labels also leads me to realise that the whole map is rotated so that east is at the bottom of the map (Cappel and Gisselberg are to the south of Marburg, not to the west). Being generous, this could align with a local’s view of the city, as it’s arranged along the banks of the north-south running River Lahn (not shown on the map), but would adding a north pointer for clarity really have been that hard?

For me, the map isn’t quite as bad as this one from Meiningen (although it bears a lot of similarities), but it’s pretty darn close. Ugly, technically deficient and almost entirely useless. 

Sidenote: Lines 1 through 20 (with some gaps), then Line 383? What’s that about?

Our rating: Still bad enough for no stars, even if it is just a teensy bit better than Meiningen’s dismal effort.

Source: Stadtwerk Marburg website