Submitted by Felix Taaff, who says:

Attached is a map of available bus routes from a single stop near Sydney’s Central Station. Apologies for the image quality [Don’t worry – I straightened the image in Photoshop – Cam].

I was intrigued by the map with my first impression being that it would be very useful to tourists and visitors near Central station, with a network of routes shown but focussing on the CBD area.

But after testing a couple of hypothetical queries I noticed some design issues, including, it’s not clear which stops Town Hall is next to, finding a route number for the closer stops is confusing and suggests they should’ve used more colours instead of repeating blue, some street names are not shown (e.g. King Street and Pitt Street) likely due to an abundance of other text such as bus stop numbers (not sure of the purpose of these), and most importantly, there are no suburb names on the map. Also why is the 374 line separated from the others, as if it goes through Hyde Park, and what happens at the + of the 430/311 lines near Town Hall? Overall I found it quite useful as a Sydney resident with some background knowledge, but I fear most visitors would stumble on using this map.

Transit Maps says:

This is a very peculiar map, Felix. It’s a form of spider map, showing routes in a particular direction from particular bus stop, but it’s far more geographically oriented than most, which tend to be more diagrammatic in nature. This, I think, is where its problems begin.

From what I can work out, this map shows northbound routes only from the bus stop on Elizabeth Street at Hay Street. So every route shown (and there are nine of them!) are all travelling north on Elizabeth Street, even though the route lines span an area much, much wider than that street. The empty gap between the grey 343 and the dark blue 374 doesn’t help much, as it makes it look like the rightmost group of routes must be travelling on a different street. The only reason I can see for the gap is to get the 339 and 374 badges to line up next to each other… which is silly, as they could just be offset vertically to fit properly. Adding another badge for the 343 as part of this group would help immensely as well.

Another note on the bus number badges: in my opinion, the group heading north over the Harbour Bridge are labelled in the wrong order. From left to right, the lines as shown are the mid-blue 430, the dark blue 320, and the grey 343… but from top to bottom they’re labelled as the 320, 343 and 430. You could argue that this is in ascending numerical order, but I feel it’s always more important for the lines and numbers to correspond visually for easy reference. As it stands, the 430’s badge barely touches its corresponding route line.

The 311 took me a while to work out, but then I realised that it has a janky little route that starts at the Elizabeth Street/Hay Street stop before going out along Oxford Street and Darlinghurst Road to Elizabeth Bay and Potts Point (off the right edge of the map), before returning to the city (crossing Elizabeth Street again at Park Street) and heading up to its northern terminus in The Rocks. Weird!

It’s definitely unfortunate that three mid-blue lines run adjacent to each other along Park Street (the M50, 311 and 430), as there’s very little contrast between them. An expanded colour palette could be the solution, but Sydney wayfinding is pretty rigid in having the different transit modes distinguished by a limited set of colours – red for light rail, green for ferries, blue for buses (and everything else for trains).

The labelling for the Town Hall Station (Park Street, Stand K) and Sheraton on the Park (Elizabeth Street) stops are definitely problematic, mainly because of that gap between the Elizabeth Street routes. It really does makes it look like the two leftmost dots on Elizabeth Street belong to the Town Hall label, which is ambiguously placed. Strangely, the Martin Place and Chifley Square stops have a little joining line to “bridge the gap” on Elizabeth Street, but it seems to have been omitted here.

I’m not too concerned about the lack of suburb names on the map (which is basically just the CBD with a tiny bit of Pyrmont and Darlinghurst at the edges), but I would like to see final destinations for each of the routes that leaves the map. “Continues beyond CBD” is almost willfully unhelpful.

Our final word: In the end, I’m just puzzled as to exactly who this map is trying to help. Felix mentions tourists, but I really hope they’re not standing forlornly on Elizabeth Street trying to catch a bus into town! Regular commuters will have “their” bus route committed to memory, and don’t need all the fussy information about intermediate city stops – they just want to get on a bus and go home! And casual users are probably going to be more interested in the final destinations of the buses, and that’s not indicated here. Overall, it just seems like a map without a clear purpose or vision. Two stars.