Delhi Integrated Transit Map

The Cognitive Delhi Bus Map is a redesign of Delhi's bus network based on how people perceive and remember cities rather than how they are geographically measured. Developed through research into cognitive mapping, the project transforms a complex transport system into an intuitive diagram that reveals patterns of movement, orientation and connection. This started as a fun project for them while the workload was less in the office on architectural projects. However, we decided to do this a bit more seriously in 2015 when we realized that Delhi didn’t have a public transport map. “How do you expect people to take public transport when there is no map?” is a question we asked as citizens.


Most big cities in the world have metro and bus lines marked on a map that tourists and residents can carry around with them. These maps are
distributed free at major landmarks and bus and metro stops. In India people have learned how to read such maps after the Metro started displaying these in trains and at stations. However, whereas most cities have fewer bus lines than 100, Delhi has 550 bus routes. This points both to the need for rationalising bus routes and weeding out duplicates and overlapping routes, as well as to the plotting of routes on a map. The bus was adopted and published by the Delhi Tourism and Transportation Development Corporation for distribution at key locations across Delhi. The Map first converts the very complicated pattern of roads of the city into a cognitive diagram: a simple map made of 90 and 45 degree lines.  This is similar to the maps drawn behind wedding invites which simplify the roads of the city to right angles. On this diagram, 100 of Delhi’s over 550 bus routes have been depicted along with Metro and HoHo bus routes. The routes were shortlisted on the basis of frequency and any routes with buses more than 15 minutes apart were left out of the map.

While creating the map, the designers discovered a hidden logic to bus route numbering devised in the late 70’s and early 80’s that somewhat compensated for lack of transit maps in Delhi. This logic, however, was neither made public so that people would follow its simple logic to understand the general direction the bus was heading,  nor was it made clear to the internal departments of DTC itself so that bus numbers in the future could be patterned on the same logic.