Submitted by Dan Reed, who says:
Tysons Corner, Virginia is the archetypal suburban edge city and as traffic becomes unbearable, officials are hustling to get people on transit, particularly the new Silver Line with four local stops. The owners of Tysons Corner Center, one of the nation’s biggest malls and a tourist attraction in its own right, seem to have made this “spider map” showing all of the bus and rail service to and from the mall. I think it’s a great idea, though the execution feels thrown together, to say the least. I’m curious to hear your thoughts!
Transit Maps says:
Anything that encourages the use of transit rather than single-occupancy vehicles to reach edge cities like Tysons Corner (already the 12th largest employment centre in the United States and growing rapidly) is to be encouraged, but this map is pretty bare bones and not very attractive. As Dan says, it all feels a bit slapdash, with route lines and labels criss-crossing each other at all sorts of random angles. Metrorail stations only get shown if they have a bus service that goes to Tysons, and only the four stations that are within the Tysons area have a linking route line. The rest just exist in splendid isolation, with no indication of how they connect to the rest of the system at all.
These faults are mitigated a bit on the website, where the map is somewhat interactive: hover over a route and all the others fade back, allowing you to trace a route more easily from beginning to end. A further click is then meant to take you to that route’s timetable, but it seems that most of the regional bus operators have re-organised their websites since this map was made. All you get now for many of the routes is a 404 page. Oops! An interactive map that links to external websites must be kept up to date or it becomes useless and frustrates users.
Our rating: Well-meaning, and a start at getting commuters to Tysons out of their cars, but unattractive and difficult to use. The unmaintained interactive version will not win any friends. 1 star.
Source: Access Tysons website