Submitted by Robert, who says:

Nice, the fifth most populated city in France, recently expanded its tram network to all major districts. I designed a map to help people get around more easily.

Transit Maps says:

When I visited Nice back in 2003, it didn’t even have a tramway (which meant a lot of walking for me!), so to see an extensive system like this only 17 years later is quite amazing. The system has headways as short as four minutes, and uses on-board batteries on the T1 line to cross the Place Masséna and Place Garibaldi without unsightly overhead wires.

Robert’s map is generally neat and clean, presenting a good schematic overview of the network, but there are a few elements and design decisions that I find puzzling. First is the use of a callout box to list the stops between Ferber and Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen on the T2 line… there’s nothing special or unique about these stops that I can see, so I can only surmise that Robert simply ran out of space to fit them in conventionally. I don’t find it a very satisfactory solution, and I’d love to see if Robert could come up with a way to reconfigure things so that these stops get equal treatment with all the others.

Another strange choice is the placement of the CADAM stop at the end of T2 to the east of T3. In reality, T2 takes a turn to the west here and CADAM lies on the other side of T3. I’m not sure exactly why Robert is reluctant to show the lines in their correct relative positions here: it would improve the diagram if T3 continued in a straight line without that little jog before Méridia, and there’s plenty of room for CADAM above Digue des Français.

Hyphenating names is something I always see as a last resort – the “Termi-nal” breaks at the airport stops don’t read particularly well, and I think Robert should look for ways to avoid this if possible. While we’re on the subject of the airport, I believe that the tram is free between the terminals and the Grand Arénas stop, which would be nice to show on the map, especially for visitors to Nice.

Robert has done a great job of showing the odd layout of the Grand Arénas stop, which is really three separate platforms in fairly close proximity, each serving a completely different travel direction. Perhaps this approach could also be used at the Jean Médecin and Garabaldi interchanges, which do require some walking between the separate platforms. The indication of parklands as landmarks is nice, as is Robert’s adorable little steam train to indicate mainline SNCF services – I’d probably have them all facing the same way to keep the shape of the icon consistent, however.

Our final word: A solid effort that’s definitely very readable and usable. The seemingly arbitrary callout box for some stops is my biggest worry.