Submitted by the designer, Hugo, who says:

I have always been ashamed of the official transit diagram for the tram system of The Hague [PDF link – Cam]. It’s a weird A4-shaped portrait diagram oriented so that the beach is at the top which is a strange choice as most residents of The Hague would tell you they think the beach is to the West/left. In reality it’s to the North-West and should be diagonal. There is plenty more things wrong with the current map, but I’m sure you can spot them by just looking at the map for a few minutes.

I have tried to redesign the map by adhering to the true north, using normal angles and coherent curve radii. The design tries to emulate the grids of The Hague’s road network by spacing the lines evenly. I stuck to the original colours which turned out to just be the default swatches in Illustrator, however I do think the map would also work nicely with an Amsterdam style colour differentiation of lines based on how they traverse the city centre (above or below ground or avoiding the centre completely).

Transit Maps says:

This is a big visual improvement over the official diagram, which I have always thought of as a bit generic and bland – though I will say that it has quite a bit of information encoded into it that Hugo’s version does not, like the peak hour-only nature of Line 34, accessibility information, bus transfers, and even zone boundaries.

However, there’s a lot to like about the visual impact of rotating the coast 45 degrees counter-clockwise (far closer to the reality of real-world geography) and having almost all the lines running at that angle. Though there’s a few vertical and horizontal route lines, this is almost a rotated rectilinear diagram like the old Montréal Metro diagram, and it looks superb. I really like the way that the main spine of lines 3, 4 and 34 come up from Zoetermeer and get reflected onto the left side of the diagram before splitting up to go to their final destinations. I will say that there’s perhaps an opportunity here with a little bit of tweaking to get a really nice vertical axis – the top of the 90-degree turn in Line 2, the Beatrixkwartier stop, the crossover in the NS rail lines and the vertical alignment of lines 1 and 15 could all line up perfectly from top to bottom and it would look amazing. They’re all just ever so slightly to one side of the axis line or the other at the moment. And if that vertical axis could be placed exactly halfway along the horizontal part of the 3/4/34 spine, so the two halves really are mirrored… well, that would be the icing on the cake.

I also like the use of parkland and the river to both orient the user within the city and to provide shape to the greater urban area – the satellite nature of Zoetermeer is particularly obvious.

Labelling is good throughout (all horizontal), but it might be nice to see if text throughout could just get a little bit bigger. The label for Den Haag Centraal seems placed a bit too far away from the actual station: I wonder if moving the NS symbol inside the station name box and then shifting everything to the left might work?

Despite all the line colours just being Adobe Illustrator default swatches, they actually work quite well, though there is one instance where the palette fails colour-blindness simulations: they grey cased line used for planned lines looks identical to the teal of the under construction part of Line 19. This is mitigated somewhat by the notes on the map itself, but it’d still be nice to have one render as warm/yellow and the other as cool/blue when viewed by a colour-blind user.

Our final word: Looks great! Perhaps doesn’t contain as much information as the official diagram, nut more than makes up for it with good visual design.