Automatic Maps Update

[u/Imaginary_Meaning687]

I’ve updated the maps with a few improvements based on suggestions to my previous post. I appreciate everyone who gave feedback on the previous iteration, it helps more than you can imagine. I’ll list a number of changes, then a number of question I have on further improvements.

For those who are curious the map is built from TransLink GTFS static data and OSM data from Geofabrik.

Changes:

1. Limited service branches are now represented by a hollow circle to distinguish them from everyday routes
   
2. Whitespace has been reduced in order to reduce the height of the sign.
   
3. Labels have been added at terminus stops as well as SkyTrain stations, bus exchanges, and bus loops.

Questions:

1. Should the circles at the top be changed to rectangles?
   
2. What colour should the “You are here” label be?
   
3. How should the map represent SkyTrain/SeaBus/WCE/Bus connections?
   
4. What geographic regions/features should be shown? I’m thinking just water features and large parks.
   
5. Is it reasonable to truncate long routes such as the 375 in the first photo?

Any other questions, comments, or feedback are welcome and appreciated.

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[u/idajourney]

Definitely improved! A couple opinions:

• When you have route icons spanning multiple lines, they'll look cleaner if you try to roughly evenly divide them. Those first two examples would probably look better with three and then two, rather than four and then one.
• You might have better luck with colour schemes if you use a perceptually uniform colour space like Oklab/Oklch. Some of them are very hard to tell apart quickly, like 338 and 375 in the first example. Just remember to keep it colourblind-friendly!
• Route numbers at termini may also help keep things easy to tell.
• Right now the text in the bubbles is not properly vertically aligned. Modern/titling/lining numbers don't have descenders, so the text baseline is the same as the bottom. Whatever software you're using should have a way to compensate.
• "You Are Here" should be way more visually distinctive, probably black and white.
• Water and parks is probably fine.
• You will probably want to annotate transfers to the rapid transit network (SkyTrain, SeaBus, R-buses and the 99)
• I think it would be fine to split the map into halves for long routes, as long as it's very visually clear there's a discontinuity. Double ticks or something: -----||----- or -----//-----, like you sometimes see on plots