Worldbuilding
A city’s transport map tells on it faster than its history books do.
Which lines are direct, which ones loop round the edge of town, which districts are served until midnight and which are quietly abandoned to the hourly bus. Even the missing connections matter. A fictional place starts to feel inhabited when the routes suggest habit, privilege, neglect. Last trains are especially revealing. They show who the city expects to get home easily, and who it expects to wait under a flickering timetable with everyone else who was never quite planned for.
Which lines are direct, which ones loop round the edge of town, which districts are served until midnight and which are quietly abandoned to the hourly bus. Even the missing connections matter. A fictional place starts to feel inhabited when the routes suggest habit, privilege, neglect. Last trains are especially revealing. They show who the city expects to get home easily, and who it expects to wait under a flickering timetable with everyone else who was never quite planned for.
Transport maps are useful, but they can also lie by omission. A place can look well connected on paper and still be a pain to live in if every useful route stops just short of where ordinary people actually need to go. I’d rather see the awkward gaps made visible than have everything tidied into a neat web. Real cities are full of inconvenient edges.
Bus routes do this as well, only more brutally. A rail map can flatter a city into looking ordered. The bus network shows the bits no one has bothered to make easy. In fiction, that matters because ordinary movement is where class and convenience show up without anyone announcing them. If a character needs two changes and a long wait to cross town, the city has already told you something useful.