Submitted by Heikki Salko, who says:

You keep mentioning how “there must be something worse out there.” Personally I like to think it will always hold true, but I’d still like to see your opinion on this official map from a small German town. Someone linked to it in a discussion about line numbering/naming systems, but I have to admit I didn’t quite have the courage to try figuring out that much detail…

As a related question, do you ever get the urge to just scribble a new map together in an hour and mail it to a transit agency since it’d still be better than their existing one? I know I do, and I’m hardly a professional.

Transit Maps says:

I think Heikki may have done it, folks. If any map deserves a rating of zero, it’s this one. Technically deficient, confusing to use and hideous to behold: this one’s got it all. And I can see why the route naming conventions were being discussed: here we have the A/B, the B/A, the B1, the C and the C1… clear as mud. Most of these names don’t even fit properly into their little label boxes on the map, making them almost impossible to read as well.

And if you foolishly assumed north was at the top of this map, you’d be wrong. That’s east. Well, kind of. The map is so hopelessly distorted – even for a diagrammatic map – that direction and the relative location of stops is almost totally random.

We also have white bus stops, blue stops and yellow stops, but no explanation of what that means, here or on the website. Some sort of zoning, maybe? Anyone’s guess!

Stop names regularly run into the stop marker, sometimes so badly that you can’t see the entire last letter of the name! The two zones – one for the city of Meiningen, the other for the area around the smaller village of  Herpf – are badly drawn: a rough ellipse that clashes with stop labels, and a shonky polygon that’s drawn that way in order to avoid the text and logo at the top left of the map.

Our rating: Absolutely appalling and so at odds with the normal efficient German transit map style. The Deutsche Bahn logo (a German design classic) must be embarrassed to be on a map this bad. I’m going to do it, everyone – for the first time, a map gets a ZERO. 

As to Heikki’s second question: All the time! However, it’s a matter of finding the time and prioritising projects for me. I have a full-time job and a two-year old son: “free time” seems to be a dwindling resource for me these days! 

Source: Official MBB website

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