2025
Night bus map
Redrawing a city's night bus network as one map a tired person can read at a glance.
- Role
- Information design
- Year
- 2025
- Focus
- Information design, Cartography, Print
The brief
Twenty-two night routes, each with its own timetable leaflet. Riders had to know which leaflet to look for before they could find out whether a bus went their way at all.
Approach
I started from the question riders actually ask at 1 a.m. — can I get home from here? — and worked backwards:
- One map for the whole network, not one per route.
- Frequency shown as line weight, so the reliable corridors are obvious.
- Only the stops where routes meet are named; everything else is a tick.
- A dark ground, because the map lives in bus shelters lit by street lamps.
The print version is A1 for shelters; the same artwork exports to a responsive SVG for the web, where tapping a line highlights its whole route.
Result
Shelter surveys after launch showed most riders could plan a two-bus journey from the map alone, up from roughly a third with the old leaflets.