The TTC is experimenting with changes to its signage for surface stops with trial installations on the 94 Wellesley bus route.
TTC’s Chris Upfold presented the new designs at the February 25th Commission meeting using a short PowerPoint which I have excerpted here.
The rationale for the new design is that existing stop poles are inconsistent in their display of information and format. This is no surprise given the evolution of stop treatment over the years, and the application of overlay stickers as needed to reflect changing services.
Maps in shelters give the entire system view, but with a lot of extra detail that clutters the map. However, these maps also suffer from the scale at which they are displayed and the absence of “You Are Here” indications.
Much supplementary information is crowded onto the map that may be of little interest to the casual traveller who just wants to get from “A” to “B”. TTC research finds that these maps are not heavily used.
For the new stop poles, the design principles used by the TTC were [from the presentation at page 5]:
- Focus on critical information
- Focus on the service rather than the stop
- Focus on the intuitive hierarchy of information
- Stick with the current infrastructure
These principles lead to updated stop poles looking like this:
The pole shows the mode(s) serving the stop, whether the vehicles are accessible, the route numbers of all services, and the stop number for NextBus text messages. The overall legend is:
Notable by its absence is any redesign of the schedule information posted at many bus stops.
The system maps are to be replaced with a hybrid local area map that includes, in diagrammatic format, selected information about routes beyond the local map.
Here is a view of a full map for one stop:
(A high resolution view of one such map has been posted by blogTO on Flickr.)
The centre of the new map is a local area street map overlaid by routes and showing the location of the stops. Except for the subway lines and the “You Are Here” pointer, there is no colour coding within this box.
In the lower right is a subway map to which is added the routes passing through the local box. This is a very strange way to show routing information because it is far from geographically accurate, and gives no sense of the wider system of which these routes are a part.
Finally, in the lower left, there is a legend which is supposed to show the periods of service during which each of the various routes and sub-routes operates.
These maps fail on many criteria, not least of which is that they completely replace a city-wide view of the system. Moreover, one of the more important components, the local area map, occupies so small a space that it does not have room to add notations or graphics for major points of interest. At the TTC meeting, there was a request from one Commissioner for Bixi locations, and obvious additions would be hospitals and other major public buildings. The local map will get very crowded very quickly.
By giving so much real estate over to the outlying parts of routes that happen to pass nearby, a vast amount of space is precluded from use for information people might actually want. This layout will become extraordinarily complex at places like Finch and Yonge where “nearby routes” stretch across the entire city and reach down to the waterfront, not to mention the effect if York Region services are added.
The hours of service legend is meaningful to someone like me, but it will definitely confuse a casual browser. What is completely missing is any sense of service frequency. Indeed, one might get the impression that the Davenport and Dupont buses are just as important as the three streetcar lines (Carlton, Bathurst and Spadina) that are also shown, but in fact they run infrequently. The white fine line along the routes is intended to show “limited hours of service”, and one can refer to the legend to see exactly when the routes do not operate. However, both of these routes are infrequent.
This brings me to Jarrett Walker’s concept of “frequent service maps” that show the network from a point of view of major and minor routes based on frequency. There may be many roads to Rome, but only one of them will get you there without a tedious series of transfers and waits. See Walker’s articles here, here, here and here.
The TTC, in abandoning its system map, has missed the opportunity to show people the hierarchy of its routes, which will provide fairly reliable, frequent service, and which require a timetable and NextBus to improve one’s odds of actually finding a vehicle.
For more commentary on this issue, please see Sean Marshall’s article on Spacing Toronto and Chris Bateman’s on blogTO. There are additional views of the maps in Steve Kupferman’s article on Torontoist.
The TTC will be seeking feedback on the new designs, and I am sure they will get an earful.
For long-time aficionados of TTC signage, we can start placing our bets on how long it will take for this detailed level of information to go out of date if the TTC makes no provision for ongoing maintenance, or relegates this to a “maybe next year” status.
Steve Munro 
I think the old poles work quite well, and with a few tweaks would incorporate many of the new elements being tested. Remove the Bus/Streetcar symbol (I don’t think it’s needed given the route number is more important than the type of vehicle) and the request stop info (should be on TTC vehicles) and you have enough room to put in all the new information on the pole. So the route numbers and related information would be under the 24 hr band and above the accessible sign.
Local stop maps should look like a blow up of the ride guide, sorta like the downtown map but related more to a 1km radius of the intersection (Intersection should be Centered!). This helps people relate information from the local map to the ride guide, as it will look similar large city to small intersection.
I probably would change the route information section by removing the operating times (repeated information from the pole, and accessible by various apps), and change that to state the route orientation ( e.g. 511 North to Bathurst subway station, South To Exhibition). The current design only says BATHURST-Exhibition place which mean nothing to tourists or other people.
This redesign seems like a copy and paste job from London, and the designer really has not taken public transit in Toronto at all.
P.S the first sample pole is done incorrectly as some branches of 112 and 123 don’t operate all day and should have a yellow background. Details counts when you are conveying information visually.
LikeLike
Look, it’s not that simple, and your vague term “people with learning disabilities” gives even more evidence that you want an easy answer to what is actually a whole network of problems. First of all, we are talking about display type, not body copy. Your position starts crumbling right from there.
Yes, of course: Gutenberg invented serifs to help dyslexics, and we’ve all proudly maintained that tradition over the ensuing 500 years.
These points are almost too ignorant to address, and in any event are irrelevant to the subject of TTC surface stops.
LikeLike
Ernie said: (comments rearranged)
If not exactly a copy-paste, TTC has definitely caught the spirit of London without looking carefully at why the spider maps are necessary.
Based on my own experiences in London (and Singapore, which uses copy-pasted spider maps) they offer three important services:
Enable you to use the bus for local journeys (which is faster and often cheaper than going underground) ~ In contrast the TTC is telling people how You can go out of your way to connect to the subway;
tell you where to board your bus (necessary when multiple buses operating multiple routes stop at different places in the same area);
Cut down on waiting time by showing you places where buses share the same corridor (so you can take the first “Oxford Road” / “Orchard Road” bus that comes along).
Does Toronto have these needs or face these challenges? Our spider maps seem to show how you can get to a ‘transfer point’ or connect to the subway or (in some cases) take a long trip to the ends of the route (which is great for transit enthusiasts and suburbanites with time on their hands).
Ernie said:
MiWay puts the letters NSEW after the route number (eg 19A N, 107 E, et c.) on their buses, as well as having detailed strip maps for each route. I think the only problem I’ve seen is that, on the rear of a bus route 1C E can look like the word “ICE” which makes no sense.
Instead of “North to” BATHURST and “South to” Exhibition perhaps N BATHURST and S Exhibition would work?
The big thing now is for the TTC to really focus on how transit users will actually use the maps, what information they really need (and how to make access to that information quick and easy), and finally, how to remove all the clutter that has already crept into the new designs.
Cheers, Moaz
LikeLike
Joe Clark says;
I don’t care why he invented them, but studies do show that for smaller print it is easier for those with Learning Disabilities, of which dyslexia is just one example, find it easier to read serif fonts in smaller type sizes, especially in longer strings of word. Put all the fanciful plain fonts you desire in larger type but lets accommodate all disabilities. Which leads me to the question: “Where is the Braille?”
Please do not treat dyslexia as a joke or a trivial matter. It certainly isn’t to those who suffer from it.
LikeLike
Does the TTC have adequate resources to maintain all this posted information? How many distinct maps must be created?
LikeLike
Ed Drass makes a good point. As he is well aware, although route numbers on TTC stops are relatively rare – it’s not difficult to find stops showing route numbers that haven’t stopped there in years.
Even with the dead-simple stops currently in place, TTC has never had the resources to maintain them properly. Now that the stops will get so much more complex, suddenly there’s resources to do it properly?
Steve: They are just trying to have so many stops with out of date info that the fans will never be able to collect the entire set!
LikeLike
The new map design makes me wonder: is TTC going about assigning a colour to each of its routes? Actually, this may be a good idea. Imagine if the routes were coloured on the old system map (and not just red), it would be easier to trace a particular route.
LikeLike
When will the TTC’s planned on-street survey take place? Will there be a small ceremony with Brad and Jessica there to commence the survey-taking?
Steve: Not sure. There has been no announcement.
LikeLike
Sjors (perhaps rhetorically) asked:
On their 94 Wellesley Pilot Program page the TTC website promises an online survey will be available on the website this week. (The page went up last Friday, and promises a survey “next week.”) They are also inviting comments and suggestions via their online forms.
LikeLike
I noticed that on the website last week. Even @ttchelps did not know the answer. I would like to know an actual date because next week can mean next week and when that comes they’ll still say “next week”.
LikeLike
Does anyone expect to see these stop poles and maps along the Wellesley-94 route rolled out TTC-wide? It’s a pretty good bet that they will wither on the vine for years, meeting the same fate as the TTC’s other pilot projects: Yellow Line/Green Line/dragon icons at half of St. George station and the multi-use paper transfers for 512-St. Clair.
LikeLike
Looks like New York has a better idea.
LikeLike
LED or LCD touch displays would be fine for the subway, but won’t work at bus and streetcar stops outdoors in full daylight.
LikeLike