Submitted by Davey, who says:

Not a heavy Metro-centric map like your usual fare, these are mostly country road coaches spanning the wide south-west of Western Australia (spanning about 1,300kms from Kalbarri to Esperance). I find it interesting to look at though, especially the reliance on different dot-dash combinations for each coach. Would be interesting to hear your thoughts.

Transit Maps says:

First things first – let’s get the pronunciation of this awkwardly styled name out of the way: it’s “Trans double-u ay”, short for “Transport Western Australia”, even though it really looks like it should be “Trans-wah”.

The next thing to note is the sheer scale of this map: it stretches over 685 km (425 miles) east to west, and 950 km (590 miles) north to south – and that’s still only the southwest quarter of the state of Western Australia! Interestingly, the map shows both rail services and long-distance coach services on the same map – the rail tends to run more frequently than the buses, which are often on a thrice-weekly schedule. While the train stations get a fairly traditional black dot to indicate stations, the bus stops get an odd little bullet point adjacent to the relevant route lines, which is not something I’ve ever seen before. It seems that this approach has been taken because the different line styles used for the bus route lines – solid, dashed, dotted, etc.) would make it difficult for any normal stop symbol to work effectively.

All these different line styles are implemented so that the routes can be colour coded into directional groups but it does make the map look very busy, and all the usual problems with dashes, etc. being interpreted as meaning “under construction” or “less service” come into play as well. As there’s only a few lines in each grouping, I’d have preferred to see variations in solid colours instead – tints and shades of the base colour would probably work just fine.

One big plus, however: the “Service Connection” marker really does indicate a location where you can get off a bus and transfer to another destination within a reasonable timeframe – a huge consideration when another bus might not be along for a couple of days!

Our final word: Perhaps an overly-complex solution to a pretty simple problem, but it does the job in the end. Two-and-half stars.

Source: Transwa website