By Micah Sébastien Zhang
Transit, I just love it so much.
It’s the eternal lifesaver for international students who don’t have cars, the extension of my feet to explore the city, and the signs of a city’s wealth and prowess.
Yet, this time, I’m talking about the physical signs, not the figurative ones.
This thingy right here
Bus signs in Vancouver, operated by TransLink, are neat. They are easy to read and have a unified design, and they all have the little, functional things that keep the entire transit system in Vancouver up and running. Yet, they can have a lot more improvements, and someone has raised a voice for that.
Uytae Lee, the founder of About Here, created a video as part of his series Stories About Here for CBC Vancouver. He proposed and made some personal renovations to the bus signs as he realized that the original ones couldn’t effectively point out the directions of buses for travellers. With a well-designed map with different bus routes, commuters can know their way intuitively.
"The result of all that, I think, is a transit system that can be difficult and intimidating to navigate."
—— Uytae Lee, from How to Fix Bus Stop Signs: Uytae Lee’s Stories About Here
That’s him in my journalism class as a guest speaker. What a sweet guy 🙂
His opinions greatly resemble mine; bus signs in Vancouver contain too little information to me. All you can see on them are just bus routes and their destinations. As a newcomer to Vancouver (and also Canada), I feel like there’s no way for me to navigate without any help from apps like Google Maps or Transit, but that is not a problem in Shenzhen — the Chinese city where I came from.
Bus stops in Shenzhen are filled with information, and you’ll understand them if I show an example.
So, here’s a typical bus stop in Shenzhen.
By GAUAI Shfj 992833 – Own work, Published under CC0 Public Domain License, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=154814241
For non-Chinese speakers, here are my annotations, taking M392 as a closer example. (The name of the bus stop is largely omitted in the original photo, but we can still see it in red fonts circled by red boxes.)
Do you see the difference here?
The ones in Shenzhen are filled with a plethora of information. You can see everything on a single board: routes, their destinations, all their stops, fare charges, and many more. All these pieces of information can be presented on a single board with simple designs, and this entire design makes commuting less daunting as well, especially for new travellers: if you alight at the wrong stop, you can always see the sign to determine where are you and how many stops you could take to head back.
So why couldn’t we do the same thing?
The answer might be surprising: English is not the ideal language for it.
The development of the Chinese language throughout history has transformed it as a language based on ancient hieroglyphs. The result of that is that instead of putting limited and repetitive alphabets together to form words, we have structural and blocky characters that represent their unique meanings on their own. Basically, with simple combinations, multiple new meanings could be formed. While English could sometimes be naturally concise in my experience, it is also, and still, not the easiest language to juggle with in terms of graphic design.
And I’ll show you some examples.
Just taking from the bus stop signs themselves here in Vancouver, it’ll be an improvement if I could transform them into the Shenzhen-style. So, I started with R4, our beloved rapid bus to the UBC.
This is the result.
It’s neat and concise, and we can incorporate more route information in there.
But here’s the result in English.
This is a CHONKER
For English, I have to make the design entirely different since English typically doesn’t have the tradition of delivering long texts vertically, while you can see this tradition in most ancient Chinese texts and literary works. Even though I somehow successfully made the design, I still have to omit the street information for space and keep in mind that it is just the information of one single bus route, and it’s already coming in this crazy length.
The thing I’m trying to write here is not to discourage any possibilities to renovate the bus stop signs; it is more about a thing of give-or-take under this language context. The ones in Shenzhen can work simply because they are adapting a language that is more friendly to graphic designs, yet that doesn’t mean we should stop finding new ways viable in English.
Though I definitely would not say that I’m a design and accessibility expert, if I were thinking about possible improvements, I’d always think about the worst scenario possible.
Imagine this: you’re stranded alone in an unknown neighbourhood, you only remember the address of your home and its location on the map, your phone battery is drained, and you don’t have anything to charge your phone……luckily, the buses are still up and running, and all you want is a transit map (or at least all the stops of the incoming bus route) to help you to get home.
And then you look up and only see "7" and "Nanaimo" on the sign……
Now you see my point here.
VROOM 