Project Information
Purpose
DayZ, as an open world sandbox with its own history and backstory, is a great place to practice graphic design, planning and history.
This map is designed simply to imagine what the pre-apocalypse public transport network for South Zagoria, the province of Chernarus where DayZ is located.
Some of the initial feedback on this map seemed to get this mixed up with the DayZ Standalone map (Chernarus+) which actually contains some significant differences when compared to DayZ Mod. This includes an extended railway line, additional towns and extra military bases. Just to be clear, this is for the Arma 2 mod version of Chernarus, not Standalone.
Planning the network
Without going into too much detail, my approach to planning the network is based off a fairly new theory of public transport network planning called 'Triangle Town'.
Basically, it is based off a Swiss approach to regional public transport which involves connecting primary and secondary nods with each other in increasingly smaller triangles. The process involves a number of steps, but can be briefly summarised as progressively identifying and connecting nodes of primary, secondary and tertiary importance to create a network 'backbone' along which services can run.
Triangle Town is useful for this situation as it doesn't require high-frequency services, which would be impractical and useless for 99% of a vehicle's journey when travelling through the countryside of Chernarus.
This has been implemented in this map where I began with identifying primary nodes. In this case, they were the major towns and cities. Smaller villages and hamlets followed.
Some of the smallest hamlets have no services at all. This is not because I have a particular dislike for any of them (except maybe Tulga where I died glicthing through a burnt out car) but because servicing them would be fairly pointless given their tiny populations.
In the end, there's no point slavishly adhering to a theory without taking into account the context of what you are doing. I don't think that any public transport network in the world is one hundred percent compliant with any standard or theory. Judgement calls have to be made. So while this map isn't perfect, I think it is a fairly good representation of what public transport the good citizens of Chernarus might have enjoyed before the Great Infection.