Bucharest Subway Diagram with districts

So, I have now added the districts in the background of the diagram. This actually made me realize that District 5 in Bucharest has no subway access at all ( except for 2 stations that are actually in the center of the city ). There is a huge new subway line that is currently under construction and it will cover the entire district. I will illustrate it in the “Bucharest Subway in the Future” project very soon.

While adding the districts I was wondering if this would ever be relevant for anybody. I mean knowing districts isn’t something that you need to know in a subway, right? One is only interested to travel between point A to point B. I am still thinking about this but I am honestly not really convinced. It would maybe make more sense if the legend would actually have listed the stations by district instead of listing them by line ID. Have to think about this.

Update

I will definitely get rid of the districts and of the current station legend. It’s a waste of space, and they are utterly not useful. Nobody cares about the district they’re in while being in the subway. The subway doesn’t care about districts either ( it’s not necessarily planned that way ).

Instead, I was thinking what would be useful to see on a subway legend and I think that it’s the bus lines. Public transportation should feel like a single entity. This is the kind of information I might look after while being in a subway.

Old diagram version

It has loads of mistakes both graphically and from the information lay-out stand point: station names positioned vertically, interchange stations huge attention grabbing tool-tips, the lines were way too thick. You can probably spot some other problems that I didn’t mention. All in all I think it was a good achievement but I wasn’t pleased with the result so I promissed myself that I will make the second version.

I started by re-thinking the entire thing. I have gone through a few iterations before getting to the one that I personally consider the best of all and enjoy most. I will post the current Bucharest Subway Map just for refference so that you can understand a few it’s specifics:

Current Bucharest Subway map

As you can see Bucharest has one single ring ( yellow ) and a few ramifications. But this might be subject to change in the upcoming years because the network is actively being expanded. And this expansion is one of the main things that I took into acount while building my map.

In my previous version the ring was a circle and it seemed right but I couldn’t be sure of it before testing other options, like a square. Bare in mind that this version isn’t finalized and has some major flaws because I realized it was a dead-end and stopped developing it:

One of the layout directions

So, I thought the square ring might be better both balance wise and in terms of information layout. But the square wasn’t optimal at all because top-right side only has 4 stations and I had massive balancing issues. Given the future lines ( the orange dotted in the official subway map ) Piata Iancului had to be paralel to Pantelimon or otherwise it wouldn’t have been possible to connect them in the future. This way I had to push 2 ( Obor and Stefan cel Mare ) on the top side and keep Piata Iancului and Piata Muncii on the right side. So basically in the end the issue was that I couldn’t balance the spacing between the stations. Back to the drawing board and to the magic circle.

The final diagram

In the end I decided to use the circle and I don’t regret this decision at all. It’s so much friendlier and it’s easier to manage in terms of future map development. All the station names are now placed horizontally and there is no font weight or size difference. The lines are much thinner and easier to follow.

As a designer I wanted to innovate – I wanted to mark stations and interchange stations in a less traditional way. But shortly I realized that it’s not the best thing to get creative in this particular case because it would directly affect the degree of usability. The traditional way of marking these elements on a subway map is something that people got used to. Ofcourse, exploring is always good and I will post a few of my ideas in a separate, explorative project. But for this one in particular I wanted to keep it traditional.

Future map improvements

• planning to add Bucharest districts in the background
• planning to create a Future Bucharest Subway Diagram with the new lines on it
• planning to add a map legend

Any feedback is appreciated

Follow-up: Bucharest Subway Diagram – part 2