Dhaka Bus Map

With the data collection phase progressing, it's time to start thinking about the design of the actual map. In an earlier post, I referenced Cameron Booth's great blog on designing public transportation maps. His website is in many ways the best one-stop shop for transit maps, but it's not ideally suited to mapping Amman's bus system. Most of his maps deal with railway maps, which by their nature are less cluttered than bus maps. In designing a map of Amman's bus system, the overriding concern is how to represent tons of information in a small, easily decipherable page.

Between full-sized buses, coaster buses, and service taxis, Amman has several hundred routes. Not all of them will make the final cut, but it still leaves many more routes than the 12-25 that you typically see on a transit map. One group that has done a particularly stellar job with mapping many routes in a small space without sacrificing clarity is Urban Launchpad, with their map of the Dhaka bus network. I'm going to be pulling from a few parts of the map for this post, but hit the link above to check out the full map, which it easy to read, attractive the eye, and contains 60 routes with room to spare.

The first thing to note is that it's a two-part document. The first page has the map itself, depicting the different bus lines in Dhaka:

In order to fit so many routes on one page, the map itself has minimal information. It uses colors and numbers 1 through 58 to delineate routes. The second page then includes a breakdown of what each color/number signifies:

I don't know if the bus routes had predesigned numbers, but it looks like the people at Urban Launchpad created their own numbering system in order to have a readable map, and then included the second page to explain what number "22" actually means. Here's a close up of the kind of info that's on the backpage:

You can see it has the start-point, end point, and one major transit point, in both Bengali and English. Some of the route descriptions also include what looks like a company or vehicle identifier. The real beauty in the design for me though is in the use of numbers for thoroughfares through which many different buses run. For example, check out this close-up of one of the central avenues:

A normal transit map will have a 1 color = 1 route formula. Here, the colors signify different categories of routes (based on their general start and end points), but within those color groups, the mapmaker has employed small, numbered boxes to signify which buses run along that corridor. If you look just south of the stop marked Farmgate, there is a neat grouping of five colored route lines running north to south. These lines however signify over 15 different buses going through that area, and by looking at the numbered boxes it's pretty easy to tell which ones those are.

For Amman, some kind of schematic idea long these lines will be essential. There are a couple roads that carry a large number of buses. This map I think is a great way of condensing information in an easily viewable format. The excellent bilingual stop names is also a plus, though the Arab nationalist in me might put the Arabic above the English in the map we make.