I love it when people take my criticism of a map and use it as inspiration to come up with an alternative solution. Having seen my recent review of the new official map (October 2016, 1.5 stars), Peter took it upon himself to redesign it – and quickly, taking less than a day to come up with his version. 

Peter obviously agreed with a lot of my concerns about the official map, because he’s addressed pretty much all of them here: simplified coastline and route trajectories, an inset for the downtown Metromover, the placement of the Downtown Express “e” logo within the relevant station’s dot, and so on… it’s like he’s reading my mind! The overall effect is much improved: the map is very clear and easy to read, although the excision of bus route information means that a direct comparison between the two maps is difficult. (One could argue that the inclusion of a long list of bus numbers without any further information isn’t actually that useful, but I digress…)

There are a couple of minor things that could looked at to improve the map further. The maps’s legend is strangely split into two parts, one off to the left and one hiding underneath the Metromover inset: I think these could be combined into one unified box. There’s certainly plenty of space over to the left for it.

The little blue squiggle representing the Metromover on the main map is very nicely done, but the top part of it gets a little close to the “Culmer” label, which could lead some people to think that there’s some sort of Metrorail/Metromover connection there.

I’d move the “Brownsville” station up a little bit to balance the spacing of the labels a little better along that section. The “Tri-Rail” station name is a little cheaty, as the Metrorail station is named “Tri-Rail”, while the Tri-Rail station is called “Metrorail Transfer”, each indicating a connection to the other service at the respective stations. The official map doesn’t do such a good job of making this clear either, so I can understand any confusion on Peter’s behalf. Finally, I’m not really ever in favour of all-caps labels on transit maps (mixed case is easier to read and just looks better, I feel), although i know that Peter was just emulating the real map’s typography to show how it could work better.

Our rating: That’s better! Clean, modern, easy to read – everything the official map should be, and made in less than 24 hours! Three-and-a-half stars!

Source: Peter’s “Transit Oriented” website (no longer on-line)