Sunday 16 September 2012

impartial public transport maps

I've recently come across an excellent map of South Yorkshire, designed and edited by a group of users. It can be found at http://www.sy-transport.co.uk/maps.html and I would urge anyone who ever visits South Yorks to save a copy on their smartphone or PC. There are some other impartial maps of Yorkshire available: A very good map of Hull is on the Hull city council website. York city council produces an okay map, accessible here. It does include services of all operators, but does seem to give undue prominence to the services of First, showing their route colours etc when this is arguably unnecessary. It would also be nice if it could go out a little further, to show the whole area that the City of York (and the 'All York' bus ticket, £5 for a days travel on all operators) covers. For many years, WY Metro have produced a series of good maps, though I must admit that the present ones are less than perfect, containing the odd error, and not giving that much information. At least these are available in printed form, however. Have I missed any other impartial Yorkshire maps? For me though, the unofficial SY map is about as good as it gets. We have both service number and routes colour-coded, where the darker blue (for both route number and road) denotes the frequency, going down to light grey for services with only occasional services. Rail and tram routes are also shown, again very clearly, and interchanges between modes are shown. If anyone from TravelSouthYorkshire is reading this, then please offer the SY-Transport people a royalty and let's get a printed copy of this done. Failing that, if any businesses fancy sponsoring a print-run of say 10,000 maps (to be distributed free of charge at bus/rail stations/tourist information etc) then I'm sure SY-Transport will be receptive to such a discussion. About the only criticism I can think of about their map is that there is some white space in the bottom right-hand corner, and perhaps at a future update Retford could be included. This would hammer home the interchanges available at Retford station, for instance. Indeed, if the guys wanted to expand further, a map of the public transport across the whole Sheffield City Region plus the Hope Valley (which bizarrely is left off the city region) would be amazing.

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