Wayfinding

I generally like to leave open the possibility that I’m wrong. I try to avoid having strong opinions. In a few cases however, I fail in this. This article is about one of them.

I ride a lot of public transit both in in my home city of San Francisco and while I’m traveling. While I generally succeed in finding my way around stations and streets, I’m often lost as I pop my head out of the station and try to orient myself to the street. I pull out my phone, but that can generally only tell me where I am, not where I’m going. Phone compasses are quite unreliable in my experience, especially after exiting a transit station.

For a while, I had the thought that transit stations should include a compass rose on the ground at each exit. It would allow people to quickly cross-reference their mental model of a place with reality (if they had one) and easily use a map/phone to figure out where to go (if not). I was pleasantly surprised on a recent trip to Chicago to find one of these compasses on the ground right outside an L station. It helped me figure out where to go, and it left me wishing that it was more common.

Even in San Francisco, where I’m frequently using the same BART stations, I find myself having to really think about which way is which. At the Mission St stations, there are opposing entrances on the NE and SW corners of the intersection, and I can never remember which one I’m popping out at. I have to look at the exit signs, consciously think “okay, this is the NE exit, that’s Mission St, it runs N/S, so I should walk this way to walk North.” A tourist isn’t going to do that, they’re going to skip over the signs that say “NE Exit,” show up at street level, not remember that Mission runs N/S and say “which way am I going?”

Public space shouldn’t take practice to utilize. Let’s make transit stops easier to use for everyone, put a damn compass at the exit.

• DC to add compass roses outside stations
• NYC MTA Petition
• 2007 Blog Post