Some transit systems are iconic for their fonts. New York’s Helvetica, London’s Johnston – these fonts hold a special place in each city’s ethos.
But they also exist for practicality: whenever you see these fonts in the city, you implicitly know it’s affiliated with transit.
This is intentional. Consistent branding is a huge part of wayfinding, or the signage that helps people easily move around cities. And it even has the potential to increase transit ridership.
That’s what Stewart Mader believes. The chair of PATH’s Riders’ Council (you might know him from his New York/New Jersey subway map) created a database of transit agencies’ brand standards manuals from his “personal library of branding, wayfinding, and digital-strategy resources I’ve relied on to help inform the Riders’ Council collaboration with PATH,” he said.
“I found these resources useful, so I figured I should condense them on my website,” he said. “Transit agencies like it because I link directly back to their sites.”
His database – called Transit Standards – also includes resources on branding, wayfinding, and customer experience.
“I want to help transit agencies exchange best practices,” he told me.
Mader thinks it’s important to “blend distinctiveness with standardization.” Distinctiveness – like New York’s Helvetica – is what makes a place special. But standardization makes transit easy to use. And when the customer experience is good, “people will take transit more,” he said.
The Toronto Transit Commission mastered this when they switched to numbered subway lines, according to Mader. “They borrowed the best from New York, numbered lines, while maintaining their uniqueness” with their own font – Toronto Subway.
The cost of improving customer experience is often so much smaller than the cost of major capital improvements – like building a new subway line – that it often amounts to a “rounding error” in comparison, but can have huge impact on customer perception of and satisfaction with transit, said Mader.
The ultimate goal of Transit Standards is to standardize transit signage across cities while maintaining the uniqueness of individual cities. Seems like a tall order, but it’s in practice all over the place – even the United States.
“The Interstate System is a great example of standardization,” Mader said.
But better examples for transit agencies can be found in Europe. “‘Way out’ instead of ‘exit’ is standard across Europe,” Mader said. “And the United Kingdom’s National Rail system is totally standardized. Individual operators like East Midlands and Virgin Trains can focus on running their routes” with their unique brand identity, but the standardized wayfinding of National Rail makes it easy for passengers to find and move around inside train stations.
The Washington, D.C., region has many different transit providers – WMATA, Arlington Transit, DC Circulator, MARC and VRE trains – the list goes on. What if those operators consolidated their brands into one (“Transport for Washington,” if we want to keep this British theme) but kept operations separate?
Maybe consistent branding is what the Washington region needs to help boost ridership.
Photo by Sam Kittner for Mobility Lab.