Sydney’s Bankstown Line is closing for two weeks at the end of June as part of its conversion from standard heavy rail to a new and fancy high-frequency Metro line. Sydney Trains has produced the following map to help people navigate the many train replacement bus services needed to get riders around, and it’s… not great.

While I understand that producing this type of map often involves a rapid turnaround with very little budget, this effort just doesn’t convey the required information quickly and coherently. The biggest problem is that the diagram bears very little resemblance to the official map – going so far as to split Sydenham and Redfern stations into two separate parts! – so there’s nothing visually familiar for users to relate the changes to. The starkly angled type is hard to read, and the affected stations of the Bankstown Line take up far too much vertical space to be read coherently. The depiction of the Airport branch of the T8 line is almost embarrassingly bad, as is the jaunty angle the Eastern Suburbs line takes out to Bondi Junction.

As a contrast, here’s an alternate version whipped up by @RoamingZephyr on Twitter that’s just so much better:

It fits into the same shell as the original map, so there’s no cheating here – just a far more unified design that’s easier to read and understand. Note that it takes far more design cues from the full system map, so it’s much more immediately familiar to users. The grouping of the bus routes – to Central and Sydenham above the closed line, and to stations on the T8 line below it – is immediately intuitive and works really well. The inclusion of the L1 light rail line is nice for the sake of completeness, although I doubt that it would be a valid alternative to the buses for getting to the city in a timely manner. Great work that’s a definite improvement over the original in my book!