When you have sixteen routes passing through one stop, it might be time to rethink your approach to station/interchange design. I do note that the current TfL “Buses from Elephant & Castle” spider map (external PDF link) shows this interchange with a geographical street map – a huge improvement which also has the advantage of showing you exactly where each bus stand is (there are eighteen!) and which buses stop at them. Source: Mach V/Flickr
A very rudimentary and crudely printed bus map from Beijing in the early 1950s. Identifying landmarks seem to consist solely of the city’s ancient inner and outer fortified walls (which were about to be mostly torn down by this time) and what looks like the outline of the Temple of Heaven towards the bottom of the map. The original forum post (see source below) says that some of the routes shown here are still numbered […]
Well, crap. Source: Chester Beltowski/Flickr
An interesting two-color bus map from 1975. Hot pink! Strangely, while the service area boundary is heavily squared off and stylised, the routes themselves are presented very accurately. Really not the most usable map, as the route numbers are very difficult to follow from end to end. The meaning behind the dotted route lines also doesn’t appear to be explained at all on the map, but may be elsewhere in the timetable book in which […]
A rather odd map of Lithuania on the wall at the Klaipeda inter-city bus terminal. Ostensibly, I guess it depicts the coach network, or even just the nation’s main highways, but it does seem odd to have a city – Alytus – marked on the map when there’s no apparent way to get there. There’s also a couple of interesting choices made for international destinations: Tallinn and Riga (the other Baltic state capitals) are fair […]
Submitted by Helgi Waag, who says: The entire bus and ferry system of the Faroe Islands. The online version is interactive. Hubs are in boxes and sea routes in blue. The Faroe Islands – a remote island nation under Denmark’s sovereignty located about halfway between Norway and Iceland – isn’t necessarily somewhere you associate with a bustling and modern transportation network, but here it is! This map shows the Bygdaleiðir, or “village buses”, which connect the […]
Just in case you forgot you were looking at a bus map, we’ve helpfully added sixteen – yes, sixteen! – clip art images of buses to remind you. Pair with a similarly ridiculous train map from Poland. Source: Philou.cn/Flickr
Here’s a beautifully drawn old map created for the Peninsula Bus Lines in Victoria, Australia by Robert J. Amor. There’s no date, but the general aesthetics and the presence of “Military Camps” near Mount Martha leads me to believe the map is from around 1940-1947, after which Balcombe Camp became the Army Apprentice School. Elements to really look out for: the beautiful ornate compass rose, the olde-time scrolls enclosing town names, and the cameo pictures […]
An attractive and stylish route map on the side of a handsome red double-decker bus. While the service from Bury to Colchester via Bures carries a single route number (753), you actually have to change buses in Sudbury, hence the “double dot” shown there. The timetable on the bus company’s website warns that because of congestion, connections between the two buses at Sudbury may not always be timely. The second line shown from Sudbury to […]
A harrowing image from the Ukrainian city of Pripyat, built in the 1970s to house workers for the ill-fated Chernobyl nuclear plant. Pripyat lies just a few scant kilometres from the plant, and was permanently evacuated within two days of the disaster in 1986. Within the ruins of the city’s bus station is this surprisingly intact map of services offered within the local region. Pripyat is the fourth station from the top along the right […]
