New TARC Network
1,500 unique bus stops designed for the New TARC Network
The Transit Authority of River City (TARC) spent a few years redesigning our transit network. This involved holding innumerable public meetings, surveying the public, many hours of work, and more. Eventually, it was time to put the input received into practice and create the new system. There was a lot of back and forth on whether, as part of this redesign process, we should also redesign the bus stop signs. Ultimately, we decided to take it on, and it came to me to help lead the charge.
To begin, we started with an assessment of our sign, the signs of similar agencies, and how we might like to go forward from there. One of the decisions that was taken really even before we properly started is that we knew we wanted the signs to be double-sided, so that passengers could see what is on them from either direction they come to the bus stop. Referencing the work of peer agencies as examples of “best practice” was a big thing in the TARC zeitgeist at that time. The best example of this was the sign from Nashville’s WeGo. This sign was a guiding point.
To get some ideas going and see what people liked as well as disliked, I made some initial designs that captured elements from those example signs for a round of feedback.
There were some significant decisions made quite quickly. First, we decided that we wanted our signs to become much larger. The old signs were 12x18; the new ones ended up being 16x23. We also knew that we wanted the signs to move away from the red color that they had been for ages. While we had some black options for the sake of offering different choices, the general consensus from the start was to make them a light blue that sort of matches most of our buses.
Also, and I’m mentioning this now because I’m not sure where else to put it, I proposed we put a different font than the TARC brand fonts (Lato and Arial) on these signs. I put forward that we should consider Inclusive Sans, as legibility and general matters of accessibility are hugely important in public transit. The font was explicitly designed to take those into account. Everyone quickly bought into using this font, and I have been pretty happy with it in the time since.
From there we kept iterating and iterating. I was regularly taking revisions to a variety of task groups. We had a marketing group that I would bring these to bi-weekly, and then I would also take them to a separate planning task group. Once they had gotten to a reasonable place, I presented them to TARC leadership. And most importantly but also most stressfully, I presented these designs to our TARC riders to get their feedback.
There are a few key features of every sign worth noting. Each bus stop sign displays the route(s) that serve that particular stop. Those are color-coded by the frequency (how often a bus comes) of that route. Each sign also includes the stop-specific stop ID. Passengers can use the stop ID and text a phone number to learn when their bus will come. As you might have put together, that means each of the around 1,500 bus stop signs is unique. How in the world do you manage that?
In one of our meetings, our project manager said kind of in passing that he thought another agency had done some sort of mail merge process on their signs. I got to researching. I religiously watched this one video of a guy using InDesign’s mail merge bit to make customized business cards. I took what I learned from that and built my own process. I quickly realized each customized field on the signs would need its own field in a CSV file. I built an Excel sheet that our Planning team could add their data to that broke down each of these data points.
Because every single sign is different, I also had to build some layout systems that could be scaled. I had to make a system that would work for a sign with a single route with up to three branches, all the way up to signs with six different routes. In this part of things is where some of the biggest hurdles came. During the layout phase, I had been using placeholder text. It became clear as we transitioned to beginning to make real-world examples of the signs that we hadn’t finalized the naming conventions of the routes. We had a few extensive calls about this, and I learned that I would need to fit a lot more text onto these signs than I had been anticipating. This posed significant challenges for readability and consistency. I need to make a typographic system that would be consistent across the signs, while being as legible as possible. To make matters more tricky, the names of some of the routes became much longer than originally anticipated.
These signs are printed on some really fancy type of Avery label, like what you might buy from Staples to do a mass mailing, but reflective. They’re placed on a piece of aluminum. Getting the print correct also took some revising. After a few edits, we landed on doing a spot white print for the white parts of the logo and the white text in the routing to make them pop more on the sign.
For me, the biggest takeaway from this process is that when working collaboratively across departments and even organizations on something like this, it’s important to help focus people on what actually matters. I think on the whole a lot of people in the process were really interested in the colors of the signs, and how they look different than the old ones. But folks didn’t really consider some of the really key parts of the signs, like the route names. Ultimately, these signs are a communication tool, and there were times in which everyone was a bit swept away by whether we should make them blue or black instead of being concerned with the information they are conveying to the passengers.
Beyond doing the bus stop signs, we also made some wayfinding materials for a temporary transfer facility. These included some shelter posters, as well as pylon inserts and e-ink signs. Not as much to say about these other than that they generally follow work taken on during making the bus stop signs.
All in all, though, I’m proud of the work we did on these, and I think the process was a great success.
