International visitors have likely never seen anything quite like it.
By Erica C. Barnett
For Sound Transit, the World Cup games could serve as a test of the changes the light-rail agency has made to its wayfinding signage over the past few years. Sound Transit has said the changes put the region’s transit agency in line with “international standards” and make the signs easier for international travelers, non-English speakers, and people with certain disabilities to understand.
But some of the new features, such as the addition of station numbers to route maps and the removal of location information from station exits, are more confusing than clarifying.
Under the new wayfinding system, each station has a three-digit numeric code that’s displayed prominently on signs at stations, transit maps, and on trains themselves. Westlake, for instance, is now rendered as “150,” indicating that riders are at station 50 on the 1 line.
State law requires some kind of station identifier that people with limited English proficiency can easily remember. Previously, Sound Transit used a series of baffling pictograms; these included two types of bird, two types of boat, and both a moose and a deer. Unfortunately, the three-digit system seems like a marginal improvement, at best, over the twee old silhouette-style images.
Sound Transit spokeswoman Amy Enbysk said numeric station codes “are commonly used in many international transit systems to support riders with limited English proficiency, as well as visitors who may not be familiar with the region,” pointing to cities like Tokyo, Seoul and Dubai that use station numbers. However, most major cities on every non-Asian continent— London to SĂŁo Paolo to Thessaloniki—use names, not numbers, to identify stations, and they indicate station locations with simple dots. The more visual clutter a sign has, the more confusing it becomes.
But maybe I’m an outlier? According to Enbysk, the new three-digit identifiers tested well in focus groups and “customer feedback on the station codes has generally been positive, including requests to expand them to digital signage and onboard displays, which we have done.” It’s notable, though, that each station now includes a key—in English—explaining how to decode the new numeric system.
Sound Transit also has duplicate station numbers on each of its two lines, so someone who is navigating entirely by station numbers will also have to remember if they’re looking for, say, stop 56 is on the green line (where it’s 156) or the blue line (where it’s 256).
The potential for rider confusion is only compounded by the fact that Sound Transit now uses the terminal station for each line to identify which direction a train is going, rather than simple directions (north/south, east/west) or common destinations (“downtown Seattle”/”Airport”). Thus, a rider going downtown from Beacon Hill has to decide whether to stand on the side of the station that’s bound for “Lynnwood City Center” or “Downtown Federal Way,” with no obvious indication where these two non-destination cities are located geographically.
According to Enbysk, Sound Transit doesn’t use cardinal directions because most people tend to think in terms of “landmarks and destination,” not which way they’re headed. And they don’t use terms like “uptown/downtown” or “Seattle/Eastside” because light rail isn’t a “hub and spoke” system where the lines radiate from a central location, but a system that “services multiple major cities in the region.”
This rationale strikes me as typical Seattle exceptionalism, not an actual reason to omit basic, useful information from wayfinding signs. The New York City subway system, which serves a population 10 times the size of Seattle, has trains going in all different directions and isn’t really a hub-and-spoke system either, yet stations have simple, basic information about where to board with signs that indicate whether a train is generally going toward Brooklyn or Manhattan, for example. There’s no reason Sound Transit couldn’t do the same thing. Instead, our bespoke signage requires people to memorize the names of far-flung stations just to know what side of the platform to stand on.
Once a rider gets off the train, there may be one last hurdle before they reach their destination: Underground station exits that have been stripped of information about where each exit emerges at the surface Instead of “northwest corner of Fourth and Pine,” for instance, riders emerging at Westlake station face options like “A1,” “A2,” “B,” and “C.”
According to Enbysk, “Exit lettering (Exit A, B, C, etc.) is another common approach used by many rail and transit systems, such as Paris, Montreal, Rio de Janeiro, and Hong Kong, as it allows signs to remain concise in constrained spaces. We are then able to provide more detailed street and landmark information on maps and exit directories.” The difference between Seattle and all the systems Enbysk mentioned is that those systems do include information about exit locations alongside their station letters (here’s Rio, for example). Seattle’s system is the only one I’ve personally encountered that eliminates all potentially helpful information from its platform-level exit signs.
(Ironically, Seattle’s exit signs are only in English. It’s not that “Exit” is hard to decipher, but exits are one area where there is an internationally adopted image that indicates “exit” no matter what language you speak, and Sound Transit doesn’t use it.)
Sound Transit’s wayfinding system seems—perhaps not without reason—like a series of well-intentioned choices made by people who don’t actually use transit regularly. As a transit rider navigating a new city for the first time, I’m generally looking for the familiar visual language shared by most transit systems in the US and worldwide—a language that prioritizes information over the visual clutter of numbers, letters, and codes.
I kind of wish Sound Transit had surveyed World Cup visitors to ask them which is easier—memorizing information like “green/1 Line toward Lynnwood City Center, get off at Station 60, Exit A1,” or “ride the 1 line toward downtown and get off at Westlake on 5th Ave”? Based on the way most of the world does wayfinding, I can guess which one they’d pick.
Ugh no. Northbound and Southbound make NO SENSE. I don’t carry a compass when walking around. Thank goodness we ended that. Sound Transit got that right.
If I’m in Westlake, I’m meant to stand on the SOUTHBOUND platform, facing cardinal WEST in order to go NORTHEAST to Redmond?
Madness. Please… no.
All I need to know is to board the 2 line towards Redmond and get off at Overlake. And its easier for me to remember and find the A2 exit than the “Northeast 152 St and East Denny Way” exit.
Now, of course we could be better.
Yes, saying “Lynnwood via Seattle” would make it better. Yes, 1-line and 2-line are stupid. Lines could be L1, L2, L3 or A, B, C. Yes, stations A23 and B56 make more sense than (1)23 and (2)56. And no, we don’t need the Downtown, City Center prefixes and suffixes.
But overall, we moved in the right direction.
Also, Sound Transit explicitly said that they followed (or at least attempted to follow) Hong Kong MTR’s example when redesigning the exit signs.
Since it first opened, Hong Kong MTR does not use any pictogram for “exit,” only the Chinese character and the English word. (It used to be red before they changed it to green.) Its design was nearly identical to that used by Hong Kong’s highway system, with which Hongkongers were already quite familiar.
Later on that same design was copied by Beijing, Shenzhen and a few other Chinese cities…and then Seattle.
The wayfinding signs in most systems in China and Taiwan use exclusively final destinations, regardless of how little-known they are.
In comparison, many Japanese systems (JR and subways alike) list a few intermediate stops on the signs. I personally prefer this approach:
❶ Federal Way via Stadium, SeaTac/Airport
âť· Redmond via Stadium, Bellevue
①② Lynnwood via Univ. of Wash.*
(*side note: I REALLY wish they named it “UW/Husky Stadium” station instead.)
It’s additionally confusing how the lines and routes are numbered. The cities I’ve traveled to usually have separate systems for different modes of transportation, where busses may be numbers and trams may be letters and rail may be colors, and so on. In this region we’ve squandered our letters on the RapidRide system while having duplicative labels for light rail and bus lines. I live in an area between the 2 bus route and the 2 light rail line and this has already been a headache since you can’t just say “I’m grabbing the 2, can you meet me at the stop?” or similar.
It’s too long since I lived in Chicago for me to remember how the L handles things. (I remember that the line near most of the places I lived went through downtown, while the other nearby line only went to-from, but that’s about it.) But the idea that you shouldn’t know where the exits go, it’s news to me that that’s an improvement. I thought someone had simply forgotten to include that information in the latest redesign; it wouldn’t have occurred to me that they’d think it was harmful to tell people where they were going. Speaking as someone who’d never previously heard the phrase “exit directory”.
Sound Transit: Drivers doing good for non-drivers out of the goodness of their oh, so very good good good hearts!
I’d really like to know how they came to the indefensible decision to call it “Downtown Federal Way”. Federal Way does not have a downtown, and there aren’t multiple stations called “Federal Way”, so there’s no reason for an adjective.
Downtown should only be used as a directional to indicate which platform goes toward Seattle.
If I remember correctly, the addition of “Downtown” (or “City Center” in the case of Lynnwood) to the station names was requested by the governments of those cities, for reasons I don’t understand. 🤷🏻
“It’s way easier when you’re on a crush-loaded train to see you’re at G-06 and you’re getting off in three stops at G-09 than that you’re at Tameike-sanno and getting off at Ginza while trying to memorize the order of the stations between.”
It’s also a help that the train announcements are in many languages and call out the station number clearly, not just the name. So yes, knowing that we are at G-06 now and I want to get off at G-09 works. Sound Transit has much to learn from Tokyo’s 50(!) railway companies as well as others (they could start in New York).
I was pleased to hear station announcements in other languages today. French, Spanish, Japanese, from what I could make out.
You’re so right—well-intentioned decisions by people in a conference room have created a system designed for human-like automatons, not real people.
I will add that in-station announcements used to regularly refer to “northbound” and “southbound” platforms for the incoming trains, and of course there are no northbound or southbound labels on any platforms. More recently I haven’t heard the “train arriving in 2 minutes” or “train now arriving” announcements, don’t know if they’ve been scrapped entirely or just paused.
In the trains, the voice that comes out of all the speakers says “doors to my left” or “doors to my right” as if that’s supposed to be helpful when that “my” refers to nobody in particular and often comes from behind me.
And the elevators and escalators—how is it that other cities can keep this basic station infrastructure running but Seattle can’t?
I think most people understand that “doors to my left” or “doors to my right” are relative to the motion of the train.
Maybe so, but it took me probably years to figure that out.
Think of the automated announcements as a replacement of the train operator’s voice. When the operator says “my” we all understand what that refers to, right?
Why think that? If the human operator spoke through the PA, then yes I would imagine the operator looking forward. But it is a pretty big leap to imagine that the voice is replacing that of the human operator sitting at the front of the train, because the computer voice never speaks in the first person in any other context, and when the operator has something to say, they say it in their own voice over the PA.
It’s not that it isn’t possible to think this stuff through and arrive at what they must be trying to communicate, it’s that it’s not good design or phrasing, least of all for international travelers or anyone not already familiar with the light rail’s foibles. Good design communicates without making you think about it all.
It makes no sense that Sound Transit would say that people orient around landmarks and destinations and so we don’t use directional indicators on one hand, but then say that it’s not a hub and spoke system centered on Seattle so we can’t add where Seattle is to directional indicators on the other. Seattle is the most obvious landmark and destination to orient around! Having solely suburban endpoints for navigation is extremely stupid. And as you note, it is at odds with international best practices. In Portland, the MAX always says “City Center” when going towards Portland. It doesn’t say Gresham when you’re at a platform west of Portland because most riders that far west aren’t going all the way to Gresham. LA Metro uses directional indicators in addition to station terminii. London uses directional indicators.
Strongly suspect that these lesser fiefdoms with their “downtowns” didn’t want to be viewed as mere satellites to Seattle and pushed their agenda with Sound Transit.
Yeah, there is a lot of marketing around the station names and the way-finding.
I do notice that there’s a missing 59 that would be the Graham Street station! But no placeholder spot.
And also a missing 62 for Boeing Access Road 🙂
Wow, I think it’s pretty well established in the literature that women tend to use landmark routing and men tend to use cardinal directions. My wife prefers to use Google Maps directions (with that voice that we affectionately call “Gladys”), while it drives me up the wall not to know that I’m generally heading northeast.
you may think that, but without citations from “the literature” there is no reason for anyone else to think that
to which literature do you refer?
Easy enough to Google:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278262603001301
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sexual-personalities/201601/wheres-the-nearest-starbucks-sex-differences-in-wayfinding
https://womensbrainhealth.org/think-tank/think-twice/do-men-have-a-better-sense-of-direction-compared-to-women
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14607168/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23397104/
https://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/50579-giving-directions-is-there-a-difference-between-men-and-women/
not to be too pedantic but they’re two digit station number codes placed next to the lines served at that station, not 3 digit codes. This design is entirely in line with Tokyo Metro, where I found station numbers essential for navigating and super helpful. It’s way easier when you’re on a crush-loaded train to see you’re at G-06 and you’re getting off in three stops at G-09 than that you’re at Tameike-sanno and getting off at Ginza while trying to memorize the order of the stations between. Tokyo uses lettered instead of numbered lines, so the signage is a little bit easier to understand at first glance (N/G-06 instead of 1/2-06). But the green and blue dots on Link are easy enough to recognize as line numbers. Similarly, exit numbers are super easy to follow if you’re using Maps directions to your destination. Tokyo has great sprawling mezzanine complexes with exits twi kilometers apart, so it definitely matters more there than in Seattle where you’re just on one side of the street or the other.
I wish there were a good universally understandable symbol for stop number
Sound Transit refers to them consistently as “three-digit codes,” so I am doing so as well.
You pretty much have to. Otherwise it gets confusing. Othello and Spring end in the same two digits (60). One is 160 while the other is 260. But this itself makes it confusing. With a station like Northgate you are supposed to ignore the line numbers. It is 65, not 1265. Yet for the other stations you are supposed to include it — or at least somehow mention the line to avoid ambiguity.
“Tokyo uses lettered instead of numbered lines”
To me, that is the crux of the issue. As Cellbell said up above, the lines should be letters. The problem is, we not only used letters for some of the buses but used the word “Line” with them as well (e. g. RapidRide E Line). This was silly given they are not that different than the other buses. So instead of something simple (e. g. Station 40 serves both A/B Lines) we have this “1240” mess.
This numbering system is really baffling. I can’t say “take the train to station 56” because someone who doesn’t know the system could end up 40 miles from their intended stop and still be at station 56.