Major cities, like Greater Manchester and London, are really collections of places within a place. Each place has its own destinations but is also part of a wider network of routes and places.
How do visitors or new residents – think of all those thousands of students that descended on Greater Manchester city four weeks ago – make head or tail of where they are and where they want to go?
We’re working on some interesting opportunities delivering on Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s wider objectives to improve the public transport network – now affectionately known as the Bee Network.
So this month, we’re taking a closer look at the inherent complexities of planning for people movement at scale, and the challenge of ensuring placemaking remains “people first” above everything else.
More than yellow buses
One year on from Greater Manchester making history as the first place in 40 years to bring buses back under local control, Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) announced last month that record numbers were now using buses across the conurbation.
It’s great to see the newly painted yellow buses whizzing past our office on one of the city’s busiest routes. But TfGM’s vision for the city region is about more than a bus makeover.
The Bee Network will be a one-stop-shop for local travel, helping you to choose and use greener ways to get around.
It’s about bringing people together and improving lives by connecting people. As TfGM states, “we’re putting you first in everything we do to help make travel as safe and as simple as possible”.
Wayfinding has a crucial role to play in this.
With a clear user centric focus, we’re pleased to see, more and more, that wayfinding is being recognised as a key piece of the puzzle in achieving ease of movement across multiple modes of transport.
TfGM’s vision is for 50% of all journeys in Greater Manchester to be made by walking, cycling and public transport by 2040. The focus is on creating pedestrian-friendly spaces that are safer and more pleasant to use, connecting people to opportunities.
We sum it up like this:
Quality, user-friendly wayfinding is central to creating successful places, inside and outside, that connect with people.
So how do we keep a “people first” focus?
Keep it simple
Users want wayfinding signs to perform two simple roles:
- to indicate which direction they need to go in next, and
- to give reassurance that they’re on track.
First of all, work out how much information is necessary for the signage to do its job. Signing every possible destination shows good intentions but it won’t help get people from A to B.
The Oxford Road Corridor is an exceptional concentration of knowledge-intensive, entrepreneurial and cultural organisations, and the busiest bus route in Europe. It’s less of a single place and more of a collection of places.
So to avoid information overload and to keep things simple, our strategy has identified character areas within the wider corridor and proposed a hierarchy of information, signing users to these zones first, and then to the destinations themselves.
Present it clearly
How to graphically present something as complex as a transport network is the million-dollar question.
Vignelli’s iconic New York subway map (1970) was devised after the previous mapping – having evolved organically – became so complex that users couldn’t understand it.
The subway system has now reached a point where only an expert can find his way around it.
– Graphic designer George Salomon, 1957
Graphic designer, Massimo Vignelli, ditched irrelevant information – such as distinctions between different rail companies – and distinguished each route instead with a colour and a letter or number. It also straightened out routes into lines with regular intervals between stops, rather than attempting to accurately depict routes or distances. All this meant the information was more clearly presented.
Our mapping of the cycling route in Swansea may not be of the same scale, but it still needed thoughtful design to make it as easy as possible for users to choose cycling over the car.
Understand the bigger picture
Complex transport networks function at multiple scales. Major cities like Greater Manchester and London are both one place, and a collection of places. A wayfinding system needs to work for every part of the whole network, not just the major destinations but each individual neighbourhood, too.
That means it needs to be continuous and coherent, nudging people on from one decision point to another.
Keep it consistent
With this in mind, it’s absolutely crucial that the information is consistent.
Signing users to a building’s entrance is useful but it’s the final leg in their journey. How did they get to the building? How did they get from their home across different modes of transport?
In a complex network of routes and destinations, information across pedestrian maps, bus stops and stations all need to refer to destinations or decision points in the same way to provide that seamless journey experience.
Our wayfinding audit at the University of Sheffield identified information gaps in bus stop directional information. The university is listed on the bus timetable as a destination however not on the bus stops themselves creating confusion.
This is about avoiding silos and working in collaboration, to avoid disjointed information.
Complex projects require collaboration at all stages
Getting the signage right across complex multi-modal transport networks is not easy, but it is possible.
A project may be complex, but the solution still needs to be simple.
Putting people first requires an understanding of people. Cyclists, pedestrians and public transport users have different requirements for how they need to digest information. But if you can understanding a place, the different ways people use or travel through it and where the key decision points are, you will be halfway there.
Taking a collaborative approach with stakeholders and experts from across the built environment is absolutely key, too, to devising strategies that achieve the end goal:
An urban environment that is well connected, safe and a pleasure to use, with pedestrians at its heart.
We are experts at helping improve people movement and creating places that put people first. Get in touch to discuss your next project.
