Submitted by Neil Connolly, who says: This is a map of the local train network of Ortenau (the German county next to Strasbourg in France) as it appears on the train itself. As you can see, it runs trains into France too. While I very much appreciate the network (access to the Black Forest, Offenburg, etc., from France, where I live) the map has always annoyed me, but I can’t figure out exactly why. What […]
Submitted by Michael, who says: I came across this map of Südbadenbus (which is a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn), that operates a vast network of regional buses in the state of Baden-Württemberg. It seems that the network is mainly centered around the towns of the region, so I really can’t fathom why all these local networks had to be put on one monstrous map. Transit Maps says: Well, this is pretty terrible. A vast expanse of […]
Big news out of Germany, where Karlsruhe’s KVV becomes one of the first European transit agencies to adopt a fully curvilinear diagram instead of the almost ubiquitous octolinear “Beck-style” diagram. The new map is shown here, with the old map for comparison beneath it. The old one is a solid, well-executed map, very much in the usual German style of transit map design – although perhaps a little too indistinguishable from many other very similar […]
Let’s continue our recent look at small- to medium-sized German bus networks with this network map from Schwäbisch Gmünd in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, submitted by Bert. I find this map interesting, because it really shouldn’t work as well as it does. While simplified, there doesn’t seem to be any real logic or unifying design principles behind the angles used for the route lines: they just seem to be drawn to make the routes fit together. Despite that, the […]
A transit diagram exhibiting many of the “standard” features of a German transit map: clean design, rectangles for interchange stations that increase in size according to the number of lines that pass through them, and an absence of curves on route lines. A few features set it apart from other similar maps, including the angled type used throughout, set in a slightly odd choice of Futura Condensed – not always the most legible typeface at […]
