Having just returned from a family trip to my hometown of Sydney, here’s a very relevant map designed by Jimmy Liu. Of the map, Jimmy says:

I drawn a Sydney Olympic Park Major Event Transport Guide which includes special events buses and trains, as well as regular services operated around the SOP premises. There is no such guide exist in any authorities website and I think this should provide some real benefits for people who is interested to use public transport to the location. I have tried to minimize the size of the image but it soon prove to be not quite realistic. 🙁

Transit Maps says:

I absolutely love the ambitious goal of this map – to show all the transport options available for people trying to get to Sydney Olympic Park for special events (football and cricket matches, the Royal Easter Show, etc.) – but I’m not so crazy on the execution. As Jimmy himself says, the huge size of the map becomes an impediment to easy understanding of the content as type becomes too small, etc.

I feel that Jimmy could do worse than taking a look at the spider maps that Transport for London uses for bus services, which feature greatly enlarged central areas and diagrammatic outer regions. In the case of this map, I’d enlarge the Olympic Park complex greatly – clearly showing the relationship between all the venues, the two main bus terminals and the railway station – and simplify the outer region to a more diagrammatic form that could use much less space. Users of this map don’t need to see every twist and turn in the road along the way: all they really need to know is whether there’s a stop/station near their home that takes them to Olympic Park and how long the trip might take (the special buses from the Northern Beaches seem like they’d take forever to me!). An idea of frequency of service might be nice as well. Like the London maps, locality/suburb names in larger type could help users orient themselves on the map quickly. I do like the way that Jimmy has added the street address of all the stops as a subtitle beneath each stop’s name: this is very useful information!

I query the need to show most of the regular Sydney Bus routes: none of them seem like a very efficient way to get to the venue compared to the special services, as they have to stop far more often. Case in point: the 401 bus leaves from Lidcombe station and winds slowly through the back streets to reach the Olympic precinct, while frequent shuttle trains that also leave from Lidcombe go directly to the Olympic Park train station in a matter of minutes. The 526 bus, which connects the Park with the nearby ferry wharf, is an exception to this observation.

As a whole, depiction of the ferry service could be better. I think that it should show all the wharves between Olympic Park and the city (as many, many people could come up the river), and the map also needs to depict which side of the river each wharf is actually on. The marker for the Meadowbank wharf just sits in the middle of the river, for example, which isn’t that useful.

Finally, the map is littered with misspelled names – “Iran Cove” instead of “Iron Cove”, “Rozella” instead of “Rozelle”, “Delvin St” instead of “Devlin St”, and so on. Proof reading is important, people!

In short, the concept behind the map is great, but I feel it needs to be reworked and tightened up to get the best out of the idea.