Study on Understandability of Bus Route Map Design

Abstract

Route buses, which are familiar public transportation to people, should be easy to use for everyone. However many bus users often get on a bus with psychological resistance because basic information on bus usage is not always very clearly announced to them in Japan. In this study, therefore, we focused on bus route maps and clarified the effect of the number of bus stops, font size, and other components of bus route maps on bus user understandability.

We created 8 patterns of original bus route maps and conducted experiments in which subjects searched for a bus route. The results show that the most influential factor in the understandability is the number of bus stops, follows by the size of the text. Further, we found that it is desirable to create area version maps for easy to understand bus routes if there are more than 86 bus stops on the map.