Sent my way by Nick Stylianou, here’s a map out of Melbourne, Victoria designed to support a major revamp of weekend night time transit in and around that city. For me, this piece continues a worrying recent trend of night service maps that have poor contrast and legibility, simply for the sake of pushing a dark “night” colour theme. This one even has freakin’ stars in the background, which is starting to verge on the ridiculous.
You know what? The title of the map says “Night Network” with a big crescent moon next to it: I think we can work things out from here.
Another thing that is lacking is enough detail to actually work out travel plans based on this map alone. An equivalent daytime map would have route numbers for trams and buses and properly-defined symbols for stations and stops, rather than the “general area” labels dotted around this map (including one for the Bellarine Peninsula, which isn’t even reachable via this network). At the very least, Flinders Street station – the night system’s main hub – should be properly and definitively located on the map instead of being vaguely indicated by a weird tangle of routes that may or may not indicate its position.
The absolute worst thing about this map, however, is its lack of accessibility for colour-blind users. A quick simulation in Photoshop (the second image above) reveals that the orange bus and green tram colours end up an almost identical shade of muddy yellow. With no route numbers or other identification appearing on the map or in a legend, they are nigh-on impossible to tell apart. The train and long-distance coach route lines fare a little better, but their dull blue shades still offer very low contrast with the dark background.
Our rating: Let’s be honest – people who are catching night services home from the city at 2am on the weekend are going to need more help navigating an unfamiliar system than regular daytime commuters. This map by itself doesn’t really offer that help – although I will note that it is supplemented by more detailed bus route and CBD stop location maps which seem to be a little more helpful. This is tolerable as a general introductory map to the new network, but it’s really not suited in any way to actual navigation. One star.