Metro wants your input for online bus maps

At each Metrorail station, WMATA has great local area bus maps near the station entrances.  The maps show where the buses go from the station, a zoomed-in version of the bus map showing downtown lines, the location of each bus stop in the area, and a table with estimated headways and hours of operation for each bus line that travels near the station.

Here’s the central city map:

Here’s the map of the bus stops local to Eastern Market:

Here’s the table of hours of operation and frequencies:

And here’s an excerpt from the large system map:

  I asked WMATA whether the station-specific bus maps could be linked from each Metrorail station's information page.  They're willing to do that, but there is a concern that the information would not be very usable because the maps are very large PDFs (the one for Eastern Market is about 4MB) with a lot of street detail layers (the PDFS are the same as the ones used to print the maps, which are about 4 foot by 5 foot). 

Take a look at the PDF and discuss what you think should be displayed on the wmata.com web page for the associated station:

The whole map?
Excerpts from the map?
The table of headways and hours of operation?

I think the target audience for having this map on the Metrorail station webpages would be people that live near a metrorail station or who frequently travel to a metrorail station but are unfamiliar with the bus service in that area.  It's possible that by having this information available online, we can turn a current rail rider to an occasional bus rider, too.

The other potential audience for these maps online would be tourists that are planning to stay near a Metrorail station, but it’s less likely that tourists are adventurous enough to try the bus system.  Usually they stick to rail.

Discuss in the comments whether you’d find this kind of map useful online (they’re already available at Metrorail stations).

All images courtesy WMATA