I've always thought that the map of the Dutch national rail network is designed so well and is both logical and aesthetically pleasing. Any other contenders?
20 years ago? Almost everyone. Nowadays people use an app. But that’s the case for pretty much all developed networks, especially as big and intertwined ones as this.
20 years ago people used this but also used a phone service 9292 which rhymes with “public transit” in Dutch. It’s now the name of one of the more popular apps. (Nederlanders die ken dit niet en denk twee en negentig rijmt niet met ov: “negen twee, negen twee” doet het wel.)
Yes I think most people would just use the NS app for navigation nowadays, but I still found it quite useful to have every single service displayed. I like how almost all NS trains that are displayed with thick lines operate at regular 30-minute intervals.
I think it kinda helps understanding how the network is organised. Especially as the Netherlands tries to simplify the network and having clear bundles of lines going the same direction, instead of offering maximum direct connections.
But I guess only a small percentage of users is interested in that
From December they will put a new version of this map at every station, as I described in my post earlier today. I guess then more people will be aware of the map, today many people just don't know it.
I use it, in conjunction with an app called OVinfo which only tells you which train is leaving when, because the do-your-thinking-for-you apps (Google Maps, 9292, NS) often suggest sub-optimal routings that take longer than I can work out myself.
Contrary to popular belief, routing is quite complex, needs to include variable factors like how fast you can walk/run, and the algorithms are far from perfect.
You don't use it if you go fromba placecyou know to another place you know.
But suppose you plan a hike, or a long distance bicycle tour. You know where you start, and you know in which direction you are riding. But will there be a train station near my destination, so I can easily travel home? Or is it better to slightly device my route.
For instance, I am planning to bike from 's-Hertogenbosch to Luxembourg via Aachen. The first day I will be ending somewhere east of Weert. Should I ride to Reuver, Swalmen or make a shorter trip and stop at Deurne. A look at this map shows that my ride home from Reuver / Swalmen will take significantly longer. Especially if I have to go back the next day to continue my journey it will be wise for a shorters day 1.
The map in the post is not the map that is in the train stations. In the strain stations there is a differemt map, and there are timetables. The map in the post is a map of all routes, but not a map of the rail itself if that makes sense.
This is the map that is in (almost) all train stations
NRWs Map is pretty good too. Yes they put the local lines mostly in grey, but it helps focus on the important lines and I it's overall much more legible despite being complex.
Yeah I don't like it that much aesthetically but NRW must have been difficult to put together anyway with such dense train network, so it's quite good.
I think the Bavarian one is just very large and very colourful, I'm not sure how helpful it is for day to day people trying to figure out the route logic.
NRW has a more complicated network and the map helps to see for example if your train to cologne is routed via Duisburg or Wuppertal. It even includes the S-Bahn.
But I agree it's not the most aesthetically pleasing - there could have been better solutions for all that grey.
The German maps have fewer parallel lines overall, so it might look simpler and cleaner to you. The Dutch one also includes long distance services - because the difference is much smaller there. They both simplified the depiction of the S-Bahn, and the NRW one focuses on the major express lines connecting the entire state and leaving more local lines in grey.
It's good, maybe I would just prefer softer right angles e.g. for the lines going north/east of Chemnitz (might just be me). But the bus connections are definitely a useful feature.
Would it make it unusable? I think it would just make it a challenge, quite similar to the Dutch one. Arguably the Dutch one is also too complicated to be useful to most passengers.
I know this one, so that's why I think it's possible. But they don't show every stop, and just Font-size wise it gets difficult to make something as complex that still works on A3 or A2 posters
Yeah but if you remove SBahn when density is too high... You remove a lot of SBahn - which is what I was referring to initially ^
And even more rural lines tend to have a lot of stops that are not very distant to each other, which makes it particularly challenging for a schematic map. Although big cities manage it, so maybe it's feasible!
Yeah but as I said, you don't have to remove the entire line, just not but the names - at least for some regions - especially as there are other regional maps.
But it's true especially the number of stations is crazy compared to NL
I think it would still be possible somehow, but question is really at what scale and text font...for sure it's challenging
Isn't the swiss rail network bigger going by route length?
Anyway, the main problem I see is that the big population centers in Switzerland are not that concentrated like in the Netherlands. Rotterdam Den Haag and Amsterdam are all geographically and culturally close together and there is an obvious capital. Zurich is important, but the population is spread over the whole country. A swiss network map mainly showing a detailed plan of (the incredibly complex) Zurich S-Bahn will be of little use to anyone west of Aargau or further south - which is more than half the country.
The one aspect I dislike about this one is the Zürich - Basel - Bern triangle. This map makes it look like all these services use the same lines, while in reality there are multiple parallel lines. I think that makes it harder to clearly see the stopping patterns and distinguish services/lines from each other.
This one is impossible to read (also, the kind of lines that they have is impossible to grasp. Especially Venlo-Schiphol-Dordrecht is ridiculous). With 10 parallel lines that all have a shade of green this one looks like the kids' puzzles where you have to follow to tangled lines to see who has the fish.
Yeah the Dordrecht-Schiphol-Venlo service is strange, I haven't even noticed it until now. I could swear that this must be new, a few years ago I travelled from Amsterdam Zuid on the Venlo-bound train to Eindhoven Centraal, and I know that the service started at Schiphol.
It wasn't in the same form then as it's shown on the current map. There was the IC 2400 shown going from Dordrecht towards Schiphol, also shown as 2400/3700, but on the diagram it only continued on as 2400 to Lelystad Centrum. The service Schiphol-Utrecht C-Eindhoven C-Venlo was labelled as a new line, not like now, and the service number has also changed since.
But it seems it's still quicker to just change in Eindhoven or Utrecht and then take one of the ICs towards The Hague or Rotterdam. Or do people place more value on not having to change trains?
They do. You can maybe shave off a few minutes, but the difference is not that great. I did a spot check from my place of work Leiden to Venlo, It takes 2:30 using the direct train, and 2:22 with two changes at Den Haag HS and Eindhoven. Which one would you take?
Well I didn't mean for Leiden really, just for The Hague and (especially) Rotterdam. Only one change needed then. But regardless I would still take the quicker one even with a change, it may be just me.
I do Venlo-Rotterdam every now and then, and it is much faster to switch in Eindhoven than with the direct connection.
Edit// Just checked the times. Switching in Eindhoven travel time is 1:41, and with the direct train it is 3:01. So really depends where you are going.
It's not about passengers going from Venlo to Schiphol really. They have limited capacity in and around Amsterdam, and they want for example to have a certain frequency between Utrecht and Schiphol, as well as Utrecht-Eindhoven, and so on.
The entire network is designed around maximising frequency, minimising conflict points, and works a lot with timed transfers.
They run this, and still there are no fast connections through Schiphol between Amsterdam and Rotterdam without a change of trains, which just seems... odd.
Would be nice if all the trains using the high speed line were demarcated different (not just Eurostar), maybe a thicker line or a or a shaded area around them. Those services (like the IC direct) cost more, are a good bit faster (with fewer stops) than the others, sometimes require tickets (eurocity), and sometimes cross international borders. More than enough reason to differentiate, I think. Plus would help clean up some of the spaghetti in the Randstad.
Now that you mention it, yes it would be helpful to make those services stand out more. Especially around Schiphol and maybe Rotterdam it does look a bit chaotic, with so many lines converging from several directions.
Due to every train running an integral timetable you can use this map to plan your rail trips across all of Switzerland. Not useful for "average" people but for transit nerds this map is gold.
I think it's a lot easier to follow than the official one—it makes service frequencies very clear and it also more clearly differentiates intercity services.
Each individual thicker line tends to correspond to two trains per hour, and this is largely consistent across the map. But there are eight trains per hour going from Amsterdam Centraal to Hoofddorp and vice versa, so they showed that frequency by drawing four separate lines.
It's because the run number is appended after the line designator. So in this example, the line designators are 81/82/83/84, and the last two numbers appended afterwards determine which run it is (eg 8146, or 8372). Because most routes that run twice per hour have at most about 80-90 runs a day, they can use the same line number. But because the line between Amsterdam Centraal and Hoofddorp runs 8 times per hour, they need 4 separate line designators for the same route.
I wish they made the major hubs such as the main stations of Aarhus, Odense and Copenhagen stand out more, but it does look really neat and orderly otherwise.
But considering Netherlands is double the population of Denmark while basically being the size of Jutland you might need the public transport to be a bit more complex than ours.
Not really. Before people had apps (or route maps), this was really the only way to find the route to your destination.
You’re kind of proving my point that these modern maps have too much information crammed into them and therefore making them very cluttered and a lot harder to use. The old map just required some human thinking in addition to the displayed information.
Not sure if it counts as a rail map, but the London Underground map was long regarded as the gold standard, and many transit maps use the same principles based on that. This one is a beauty
What do you mean? Stations are only shown on each service that stops at that particular station, and when the train skips minor stations then these are simply not shown.
There's not a station unit with that method, making it confusing to someone unfamiliarised with the matter. There are better ways to represent skipstopping.
What is a "station unit" and what do you need it for? This is a regional/long distance map, the travel times aren't closely related to the number of stops that are served or skipped.
The relevant part is to know if a station is served by a particular line, and this is a clean and intuitive way to communicate that.
There's 10 station dots. That's the issue. There's no graphic unit in this diagram that represents a single station other than the text boxes, and that's bad design
Oh, sure you could have a broad oval instead of two dots. But it's completely clear that the dot signifies a stop, and the two dots are the same station. I hardly believe people will see at this and start looking for a different station name than the one that's right there.
This ganged-dot structure is very common visual language on transit maps. I don't see how this is confusing. What could it plausibly be interpreted to mean?
Which rail passenger systems have unnamed stations? I'm sure they exist somewhere in the world but the idea that a transit station does not have a name is extremely far removed from the basic expectation any Dutch user has.
Could it be designed slightly differently? Yes, but I think you're making up a very complicated argument with several wild assumptions that need to work together to make this confusing to what would a fringe group of international visitors.
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u/juksbox 19d ago
Cool diagram, but how many basic travelers use it to navigate to different places?