Submitted by my dad (and you wonder where I get my love of maps from?), who says:

You may be interested in the new Paris bus map, showing major changes to be implemented in April.

Transit Maps says:

Thanks, dad! This is certainly an interesting map, as it uses a lot of familiar elements from the Paris Metro map — the Parisine font family, the slightly muted/pastel colour palette and even the general stylised layout of Paris itself — but to considerably less effect.

Part of this is due to the fact that the map is necessarily far more detailed: it has to show over 60 bus routes as well as four of Paris’ tram routes (1, 2, 3a and 3b). While the Metro map is gradually becoming loaded down with more routes as it incorporates tram, RER and Transilien services, it can always treat them more diagrammatically than a bus map can — as there’s always a need to relate bus routes to the labelled roads they travel upon. This means there’s a lot more angles used throughout the map, making it look less unified and neat. In particular, the areas around Gare St-Lazare and Gare de l’Est have a huge amount of routes heading in all directions, making some of them quite difficult to follow. Added to this, the Les Traverses local circulator routes also have to be shown in some detail, jammed in between the other lines where they can fit.

Another part of the problem is the muted colour scheme — it works well enough on the Metro map where similar hues can be kept apart, but the sheer number of routes crossing the city here means that it’s inevitable that similar or identical colours run next to each other in a lot of places, which isn’t ideal. In true rational French style, the bus numbers actually indicate useful information about the route — a number starting with “2” indicates the route begins at Gare St-Lazare, for example (more detail at Wikipedia) — so one wonders whether that could be leveraged into the route colours somehow? The assignment just seems a bit random at the moment.

It’s also not fully explained why some routes get downgraded to have a grey route line instead of a coloured one, but I presume it has something to do with frequency of service?

Our rating: Tries its hardest to look like its more well-known sibling, but the density of required information makes it come off second best. Making a bus map for such a small, dense network like this is a thankless task and the effort is laudable, but it’s not quite working as anything but a general overview for me. Two stars.

Source: Official RATP website