Tag Archives: signage

Even more signs that the Silver Line is coming…

We still don’t have word on a start date for WMATA’s new Silver Line service to Tysons Corner, but more and more signage for the service is appearing in the rest of the system.

New signage, complete with (SV) bullets at Federal Center SW Station. Photo by the author.

New signage, complete with (SV) bullets at Federal Center SW Station. Photo by the author.

This signage is from the platform pylon near the base of the escalators at Federal Center SW.

Via Twitter, Dan Malouff (@BeyondDC) took note of the new (SV) bullets on one of the narrow pylons used for Metro’s side platform stations, wondering if the bullets are using a different typeface from the rest of WMATA’s signage:

The answer is: sort of. The graphic standards (which I stumbled across via googling for this post) for the Rush Plus signage changes note that the bullets use Helvetica Bold, while the rest of the text uses Helvetica Medium.

Signs that the Silver Line is coming…

As WMATA prepares to take control of the first phase of the Silver Line from MWAA (with the exact handover date yet to be determined), signage for the new service is starting to pop-up around the system. WMATA is trying to raise awareness about the new service and new track with a dedicated website; you can see a presentation to the WMATA Board on their Silver Line activation plan here.

Some rail stations include strip maps on the station wall signage and on platform pylons. Others include backlit strip maps located above the on-platform map/advertising panels. In several stations, these maps have been updated with new Silver Line information:

Backlit strip map above one of Metro's platform ad panels at the Federal Triangle Station. Photo by the author.

Backlit westbound strip map above one of Metro’s platform ad panels at the Federal Triangle Station. Photo by the author.

Backlit strip map at Federal Triangle, including Silver Line to Largo. Photo by the author.

Backlit eastbound strip map at Federal Triangle, including Silver Line to Largo. Photo by the author.

In recent months, WMATA has installed new wall signage in Blue/Orange stations. The signage included awkward spacing for the lines/destinations, preserving space for the future inclusion of Silver Line services:

New wall signage on the westbound track at Eastern Market, with room for Silver Line information below OR and BL. Photo by the author.

New wall signage on the westbound track at Eastern Market, with room for Silver Line information below OR and BL. Photo by the author.

The current signage makes for an odd asymmetry, where the westbound signs clearly preserve space for a future (SV) bullet and destination below the current Orange and Blue line termini. The eastbound signs, however, looked more evenly spaced, perhaps anticipating the end of Orange Line ‘Rush Plus‘ service to Largo, to be replaced by Silver Line service. The revised sign will include a similar look to the eastbound strip map spotted at Federal Triangle.

The demise of at least some of the difficult-to-read striped Rush Plus bullets can’t come soon enough.

Eastbound wall signage at Eastern Market; awkward space above OR and BL destinations is reserved for future SV service. Photo by the author.

Eastbound wall signage at Eastern Market with ‘normal’ spacing; OR ‘Rush Plus’ service to Largo likely to be replaced with an SV bullet. Photo by the author.

 

What’s wrong with ‘Metro Brown?’

Last week, the Washington Post featured a lengthy profile of WMATA’s head architect, the man behind the concepts in Metro’s recently unveiled ‘station of the future‘ concept. The article offers some insight into the thinking behind the proposed re-design of the Bethesda station, as well as some of the pushback Metro has received already from the Commission on Fine Arts (among others).

Some changes seem sensible, like higher-output light fixtures to replace current fixtures, with the goal of increased light levels while staying true to Harry Weese’s indirect lighting scheme. These seem more like mechanical or operational challenges for the most part, the kind of behind-the-scenes stuff that won’t make such a huge difference in the appearance of stations.

Other proposals seem like change for the sake of change: replacing bronze with stainless steel, for example:

Karadimov acknowledges bronze as a central element of the “original palate” of Metro. But operationally, it is not ideal. Bronze needs polishing, not just cleaning, and the grime on the railing in Bethesda easily comes off to the touch. In the NoMa-Gallaudet and Largo stations, some of the system’s newest, there are already stainless steel railings that Karadimov says are less expensive to clean (though he did not have a cost estimate) and lighter in color. Same for the first group of five Silver Line stations under construction and the canopies that cover some Metro entrances.

Karadimov proposed replacing the bronze railings and escalator panels throughout the Bethesda station with stainless steel; after criticism over the idea of stripping out so much bronze, however, he retreated, agreeing not to replace the bronze with stainless steel or any concrete parapets with glass. Instead he says Metro will keep all its bronze railings. But he says the escalator panels are a less central element that needs replacing. “That is one thing that we are going to have to have a further conversation about,” he said.

While stainless steel might require less maintenance, that doesn’t make it maintenance-free. Plenty of Metro’s entrance canopies are already showing their age, along with accumulated dirt and grime. Likewise, I can’t see any objection to the use of stainless steel features in new stations, but fail to see why this is such a critical element for the improvement of existing stations. If an escalator replacement opens the door for a stainless steel enclosure instead of a bronze one, so be it – this would hardly be Metro’s first stainless escalator. However, that reasoning doesn’t apply to bronze railings that are not in need of replacement.

Stainless steel station elements at NoMa-Gallaudet U Station. Photo by author.

Aside from bronze, the other element of Metro’s aesthetic under attack is the color brown:

But if the stations are to get brighter, Karadimov said, brown cannot continue to be the dominant color. “We’re not going to keep any brown,” he said. “We believe that having a lighter color will help make the station more bright.”

Like the bronze, brown unquestionably contributes to the placid feeling of the stations, but Karadimov said it contributes just as strongly to views that the stations appear dated. Whether the agency will have to retreat on the color brown as it did on bronze has not been decided.

Karadimov also has not formally proposed a color to replace it. He talks about light gray and silver, which he said would make signage easier to read, but without stainless steel to pair it with he may have to reconsider.

As ubiquitous as brown is within the Metro system, it is by no means the dominant color inside stations. The complaint that bronze is too dark seems to ring hollow, as well. Concrete and the red tiles are far more dominant in the palate than either brown or bronze.

Brown elements are limited to accent pieces and signage. The shade of brown itself is so dark that it doesn’t readily register as a brown at all, but almost a black-brown. Contrary to the assertion from Metro, this dark background provides a great deal of contrast for white lettering, making signage easy to read. White text on dark backgrounds is hardly unique to DC in terms of mass transit signage, either.

Combination of stainless steel, painted steel, and brown signage elements at NoMa-Gallaudet U Station. Photo by author.

Even in Metro’s newer stations (those not a part of the originally planned system), Metro’s white-text-on-brown-background signage standard remained intact. Why change it now and disrupt the uniformity across the system?

The addition of gray elements to Metro’s signage scheme is not new, either. Gallery Place, WMATA’s designated ‘test’ station for new signage, has seen lots of designs over the years, including different background colors and fonts and backlit signage, and the use of gray backgrounds for directional arrows – but none abandon Metro Brown.

Wayfinding challenges for WMATA’s Rush Plus

WMATA’s recent service change, branded as Rush Plus (probably over-promising things just a bit as “rush hour reinvented”), involved deviating from Metro’s fairly straightforward delineation of lines and services via color.  Metro’s increasingly complicated service pattern is getting to the point of requiring a similarly robust nomenclature for services.

When a rider speaks of the Red Line, they refer not just to a set of tracks but also the service that operates on them.  Even this wasn’t perfect, as many Red Line trains wouldn’t operate for the full line – they would short-turn at Grosvenor or Silver Spring.  GGW’s Metro Map contest identified each of the separate services Metro regularly runs, counting ten current services, plus the future Silver Line.  Ten services is obviously more than the five colors on Metro’s map.

More problematic is the fact that color and line terminus are no longer paired.  Yellow line trains can terminate at both Franconia-Springfield and Huntington; Orange line trains can terminate at both Largo and New Carrollton.

When devising a new map to show these service changes and to prepare for the introduction of the Silver Line, Metro opted to keep the map (and service nomenclature) that riders know well the same.  However, the increasingly complex service pattern demands nomenclature to match.

WMATA’s move towards using colored bullets to help identify train services helps:

However, those bullets still only identify the all-day services, not the ‘Rush Plus’ services.  WMATA’s in-station signage uses something else:

YL Rush Only service bullet, GR bullet. CC image from justgrimes.

The striping within the bullet matches the pattern for such services on Metro’s new map, but it just doesn’t read well on in-station signage:

Rush Plus signage at Gallery Place-Chinatown. Photo by author.

From afar (or in the above case, just standing at the platform), you can’t tell the difference between the rush-only YL bullet and the regular service YL bullet.  Which means that the bullet isn’t useful for wayfinding if the rider still needs to focus on their terminal destination.  A different rush-only YL bullet adds nothing.

One potential solution would be to take a lesson from a system that has lots of different services, operating on different lines (both are distinct concepts) – New York.  Differentiation among similarly routed services can be accomplished via graphical means.

    

For some rush-only, peak-direction-only services, New York’s diamond bullets might work as an example for Metro’s rush-only services. Regular Orange Line trains [identified as (OR) in shorthand] would go to New Carrollton, while rush-only trains [identified with a diamond <OR> bullet] would go to Largo.

This wouldn’t solve all of Metro’s service naming challenges – the fact that some rush-only services bring new service to places (like more trains to Largo) while other services do not (how most Yellow trains at the peak end at Mount Vernon Square, not the ‘regular’ listed terminus of Fort Totten) and that some service patterns are not rush-only (short-turning trains on the Red Line at Grosvenor and Silver Spring) makes a simple switch difficult. Still, there’s a need to change.

This isn’t the first time this issue has popped up, and so long as Metro’s services are getting more (and not less) complex, it won’t be going away anytime soon.

Observations from San Francisco

As a nice respite to DC’s heat, I was able to spend the last week in California – including several days in San Francisco.  Some thoughts and observations from the trip:

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Hills and Grids: Gridded streets have plenty of benefits, to be sure – but the downside is that they do not react to topography.  San Francisco provides the extreme example.  The city has even preserved the right of way where topography makes streets impossible.  My own adventure to the top of Telegraph Hill included ascending the Greenwich Street stairs.

Surely, relaxing the grid would offer opportunities for a more understanding development pattern.  Nevertheless, the spaces along the staircases are certainly interesting, as are some of the extremely steep streets.  Such a pattern would not work in a colder climate that has to deal with ice and snow on a regular basis, however – lest you end up like these poor folks in Portland.

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Trucks and Buses not advised.  Um, yeah.

Trolleybuses: As a direct response to the city’s grade issues, the electric-powered trolley buses are a great solution.  The overhead wires for the buses can be a little obtrusive – but they are not nearly as much of a visual blight as the broader patchwork of utility wires strung from house to house and pole to pole.

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Zero emissions, but the wires (like rails) do act as a visual cue for a newcomer to the city (like myself) to find a bus line when I need one.  That’s a plus.

Signage: Actual signs telling you where you are or what transit line to take, however, are sorely lacking – particularly for Muni and BART.

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We can do better than this – the BART platform at Montgomery station.  The boarding signs for various train lengths is nice, but not all that intuitive – but actually determining which station you’re at when the train arrives is another challenge entirely.  Similarly, on the Muni lines that turn into streetcar routes in the outer neighborhoods, signage at the larger stations is almost non-existent – certainly not useful for a first time rider.

That said – Muni’s route symbology is incredibly easy to understand.  Each line is assigned a name (corresponding to the main street it travels on), a letter (as a single symbol) and a color.  It’s something I think Metro could learn from as its route structure becomes more and more complex.

Wayfinding signage around town, however, was much better.  Kiosks offered maps, highlighted transit routes, and in general provided very useful information – even potential ferry routes, for example:

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My favorite ‘signs’, however, where the ones doing double duty – the public toilets:

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Granted, the actual map here is faded and hard to read, but the presence of a self-cleaning public toilet in a popular tourist area like this is priceless.  Thanks to nature’s urges, I never had a chance to actually use one – but the process seems quite self-explanatory.  If not, there are simple instructions:

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This particular toilet is from JCDecaux, the same outdoor advertising firm that operates Paris’ Velib bikesharing system.

Streetcars: The F Market line’s heritage streetcars are both interesting to see on the street and also an effective part of the transit network.  They’re also quite popular:

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One note about these old PCC cars – when you’re standing (as I was while taking this picture), it’s extremely difficult to see out the small windows of these old rail cars to determine where you are – especially with Muni’s aforementioned lack of quickly visible signage.  The PCC car wiki page talks about “standee windows,” but these weren’t of much help to me.

From the outside, the diverse colors of the various liveries from around the world Muni opts to use are fantastic.

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The liveries include this lovely pastel DC Transit paint job.

More (perhaps) to come later.

Any Colour You Like

From mindgutter on flickr

From mindgutter on flickr

(Post title with apologies to Pink Floyd)

Matt Johnson, over at Track Twenty-Nine, noted that with MARTA’s official conversion over to a color-based naming system for their rail system, more than half of America’s rapid transit systems (including Metro) use a color-based system.

Starting in 1965, Boston started referring to lines by color. When Washington’s system opened in 1976, line colors indicated the route of trains. Cleveland renamed their lines to colors two years later, in 1978. When Los Angeles’ rail system started opening, lines were referred to by colors – the first heavy rail line opened in 1993, the same year that Chicago started calling trains Red, Orange, and so on. Baltimore renamed transit lines after colors around 2002. Finally, just last month, Atlanta added their Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue lines to America’s transit repertoire.

There are still 6 systems that don’t use colors to identify lines by names. However, four do differentiate lines using different colors on a map: BART, NYC Subway, PATH, and SEPTA. Miami and PATCO each only operate one heavy rail line, so color is not an issue.

In any transit system, the diagrammatic understanding of the system (often represented by the system map) is a vital element in the user’s understanding of where they are.   Colors offer an intuitive means of understanding this – as evidenced by the numerous systems using color identifiers for their maps, even if not in their overall nomenclature systems.

There are a couple of shortcomings in using color as the main identifier of lines and services, however.  One is the limited potential for expansion – Chicago has the most lines of any system using colors (8 – Red, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Green, Pink, Brown, Purple), and there aren’t a whole lot of extra options for system expansion.  Silver?  Gold?  But would that be too similar to Yellow?

That leads to the other limitation – differentiation between the lines depends solely on color, and when those differences are not evident enough (i.e. differentiating Yellow from Gold, or for a person who is colorblind), you need some sort of alternative.  Metro accomplishes this with the use of words on the trains – spelling out the color on the front LEDs, as well as the destination on the side LEDs and a two-letter color abbreviation on the PIDs.

It’s also worth noting that many airports used to have color-based naming systems, but have switched to letters and numbers for their terminals and concourses.  Growing up in Minneapolis, MSP Airport used to name their concourses with colors, but switched to letters.  The letter/number provides an easier identifier to the colorblind and those that are unfamiliar with English.

Eventually, converting to a system where color is a secondary identifier, especially as DC adds more lines, will be necessary.  Particularly if DC adds track connections that enable more services, equating a line of track with the service that it operates on is limiting.  Eventually, DC should consider changing to a naming system similar to that of Paris – where the Metro lines are all assigned numbers and colors, while the regional RER lines all have letters and colors, with numbered suffixes for branch lines in the suburbs.  Jarrett Walker delves into the details of the Parisian system:

Actually, there are FOUR tiers of information here in a clever hierarchy, all designed to ensure that you don’t have to learn more information that you need to do what you’re going to do:

  • A Métro route number signifies a simple, frequent line that doesn’t require you to learn much more, apart from riding it in the correct direction.
  • An RER route letter such as Line A identifies the common RER segment across the core of Paris and invites you to use it exactly as if it were any other metro line, without caring about its branches.
  • Odd vs. even numbered branch numbers on the RER indicate different directions on the common segment.  On Line A, for example, odd-numbered branches are all in the west, even numbered ones in the east, so as you get to know the service, the branch number tells you which way the train is going on the central segment.  Even if you’re not riding onto a specific branch, this can be useful, as redundant ‘confirming’ information, to assure you that you’re riding in the correct direction.  This is important as it’s very easy to lose your sense of north (if you ever had one) in the warrens of underground stations.
  • Finally, the individual branch numbers are needed ONLY if you’re headed for a specific suburb beyond the branch point, such as Marne-la-Vallée.

The principle is that this is a progression from simple to complex.  The point of this hierarchy is not to lead customers all the way through, but exactly the opposite: to enable them to “get off,” ignore the remaining layers, as soon as they have the information they need.

Eventually, as DC aims to better integrate the commuter rail systems and further expands Metro, integrating brands and fare structures with Metro, a re-organization of the entire naming system might be in order.  With Silver and Purple lines on the way, there aren’t a lot of other options left.  When David at GGW looked at turning DC’s commuter rail lines into a sort of express Metro system, his naming system ran head up against the limitations (lime? teal?) of the color-based systems.

Hopefully, we’ll eventually have to deal with this issue.  It’ll mean that we’ve expanded and integrated our systems beyond what we have today.  More immediately, DC’s streetcar system presents some nomenclature challenges as well – and that will be a nice problem to have.