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 São 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.