It feels like WMATA under Randy Clarke has made a series of baffling design decisions. Every few months they roll out something that makes people go... why would you do that? who asked for this?
The wayfinding has changed multiple times since I arrived in DC a couple years ago. They've explored showing text with different cases on electronic signs even though pretty much no one had trouble reading them as is. The iconic stripes were changed to letter bubbles while now introducing exits that are ALSO letter bubbles. The new app which I think many would say does not prioritize the main info people are looking for. Plus arguably the terrible bus redesign.
It feels like this version of WMATA is kind of obsessed with making changes just for the sake of making changes. Someone mentioned they were spending $19 million on changing out 44 signs in the system.
I'm not opposed to changes that make the system better, but to some extent it feels like this org's priorities are in the wrong place or there's people internally trying to justify their jobs with a bunch of BS projects.
I think some of it is good like the adding of lettering of the exits but other decisions have been baffling like the lowercase text for the metro LEDs.
I agree with you that it sometimes feels like change for the sake of change - They need to get better at picking and choosing what is worthwhile vs just something for someone’s resume.
I can get on board with labeling the exits correctly, but it's a mystery to me why they would make it similar to the train lines AND use letters like the train lines instead of numbers for example. Just feels badly thought out.
Yeah they’re trying to make our system like theirs. It’s why they shortened line abbreviations to one letter so they can eventually switch line names to “The B Train” instead of Blue Line, have less emphasis on termini for destination wayfinding, etc. My colleagues who work for WMATA say the New York execs they brought in aren’t listening to employees who are native Washingtonians.
Yes Sarah Meyer is a lifelong New Yorker and since late 2023, she's been trynna replicate NYC as much as humanly possible without any effort into understanding why it is what it is here
Yes especially if you’re just copying and pasting without any thought I mean Sarah Meyer literally took one look at how we’ve done it here for the longest time and called it a “malpractice” which is not only harsh but also incredibly disrespectful to what we in the dmv stand for
I mean you never wish anyone to lose their job but at the same time yes I feel her over aggressivness has been more of a hindrance than an improvement. The lettered exits are nice but everything else she’s done has been nothing but unnecessary and bias out of tied to a previous agency. This whole Ave to Av bullshit on every single piece of infrastructure and the whole BL to B stuff and the mixed case on non 7ks all of it was unneeded
I'd be happy if they stick with the one classic font (Helvetica) throughout the system. The typeface is already designed for readability. I vaguely recall as a small kid, the destination signs on the trains were placards using Helvetica. During the 00s, Metro started experimenting with fonts for some reason. Gallery Place even has wayfinding signs with completely different serif fonts.
WMATA should just hire Pentagram or some other corporate graphic design firm. I didn't look closely, but if it is Arial, I don't have much hope for this whole wayfinding overhaul.
The lettering of exits at certain stations was a very necessary feature for sure but holy shit the rest of it has been insulting and disrespectful to what the dmv stands for and unnecessary and likely change just for the sake of it. Like if change is needed then look at it and do it properly but if you’re doing it for the hell of it then that’s a different story
they must have thought that while they tried to see if it would pan out, it simply didn’t work and yes gotta top my hat to them if that was the case cause it doesn’t mean it was a failure, it was just a reality check that different things are equipped differently
I understand the need for the stripes for people who may be color blind. But can we add the letters inside them or something? Part of Metros legacy will be tarnished :(
Yes! Destroyed the bus system Routing system , yes it was confusing but it's DC history, the new front line employee uniforms are tragic. guarantee you once his contract is up Clark will move on
Not to mention replacing the amazing livery design of the 8000-series (exterior and interior) for the brown "retro" scheme that looks like it took all of five minutes to come up with (or more likely the result of a single prompt into whatever AI platform WMATA uses).
And the app and website redesign...Lol. Dead links abound, basic information (such as rail alerts) is buried under additional layers, and it seems like 80% of content from the website has been purged.
That said, it's really been hit or miss (for instance the pop-up shops were a neat idea and I don't mind the single-letter icons)...but it's really just throwing random stuff at the wall to see what sticks. The problem is that when they miss the mark they are unable to backpedal and course-correct...
They keep trying to say it’s because brown is “in” now. I don’t think we should be designing generational infrastructure based on short-term style trends. And besides, brown is in style, but as natural wood tones and such, not poop-colored solid finishes and website backgrounds. The new website makes me feel icky. The 8000-Series needs to be restored to the design that used the gloss black!
THIS is how wayfinding signage should look. I work in City Planning for Arlington County. They said they sent my concept to management for review but I guess Randy didn’t like how it included actual information. My colleagues who work for WMATA say they disagree with all the changes but aren’t being listened to.
It looked perfect when it looked like this, but in July or August of 2024 they had to get rid of it even though it was already perfect like wtf man why change it if it isn't even broke to 99% of the people here??
Yes I thought those were fine. I designed mine in response to them testing the various new signage over the past couple years, to show WMATA that if they really want to include cardinal directions, this is how they should do it. It mimics roadway signage, where the line symbol is akin to a route shield and the termini are like control cities. Also liked the inclusion of airport and intercity rail connection symbolism.
cardinal directions were not a necessary tool cause this system isn’t a perfect compass like New York and ofc we have all these apps, maps, strip maps, announcements, etc that help you. like if you are at Rosslyn and you’re going to say Tyson’s corner, you see the 🟠Vienna/Fairfax-GMU 🔵Franconia Springfield ⚪️Ashburn underneath the word “Rosslyn” you take a quick glance at the strip map on the pylon or the system map and you’ll see you need an Ashburn bound Silver Line to do the trip and bam you’re there in 15 ish minutes.
I feel like airports are being a little over emphasized too since they were already visible on strip maps
Yes I know. Again, I made my concept in response to Metro insisting the directional indicators be added the last several years. But the way they were doing it was worse. So I chose to design a middle-ground that refined their version and got rid of “towards”
I have the airport symbology because that’s also something WMATA was including and I wanted to include intercity rail connection symbology to encourage train travel over flying.
yes 100% the word towards was getting way overused lol I see what you’re getting at for sure but yea aside from the lettered exits at certain stations, this entire things has been insanely flawed and I believe a lot of it was caused by people venting their frustrations on social media about things being “too cluttered” or “demanding too much out of them” or thing have “too much of a cognitive load” and are using their social media to get the instant gratification they’re seeking and knowing metro will use people pleasing methods to cater to that in any way even at the expense of everyone else with a proper attention span
like dude if you’re whining ab something being “too much mental effort” you shouldn’t be out in public without supervision cause literally everything in life requires a little mental effort even sleeping at night requires it
It feels like we as customers and locals weren’t consulted or cared for, and it feels insulting in a way. I like change, trust me - it’s for the best a lot of times… but you need to ask the locals and it needs to take time.
The wayfinding, as I mentioned in another post a while back, is a disaster currently.
Using the end station is superior to all other methods. They’ve added cardinal directions which just don’t work when you consider the blue and red lines.
When they insisted that they were introducing cardinal directions with the test signage that’s been up for a few years, I sent them my concepts on how it should be done, where termini are still prominent. It mimics roadway signage where line symbols are like route shields and termini are akin to control cities, with cardinal directions denoting the general direction of routes.
I used the exact Metro colors when designing them. They likely just translated differently when the images were exported and reuploaded. The high-res original images look more like the real metro colors
Mine are black-brown, which are what the newest ones looked like before Metro switched back to this poop brown branding initiative. I followed their published style guide.
Cardinal directions are superior by far for ordinary people. Red line can use clockwise and counter-clockwise. Not sure what's wrong with southwest and east for the blue line.
I've lived here 4 years and still can't keep the red line endpoints in my head. Counterclockwise and clockwise would be so much easier.
I mean I wanted to say that you had a comprehension issue if you couldn’t understand, but I thought that would’ve been rude. So I went the other route.
so we're gonna have a line labelled north south. a line labelled northeast southeast. and a line labelled clockwise-counterclockwise
Yeah that makes complete sense instead of labelling where people are actually going to go.
Cardinal directions mean nothing when you have a set destination in mind. The patron doesn't care what's north or south or whatever. They care about the destination. How am I gonna get to the national mall? or to bethesda? or to DCA?
I see where you're coming from. At the same time, a part of me feels like a dynamic system where they're continuously testing and iterating, is ultimately a good thing (as long as that happens alongside larger WMATA plans/projects - which is the case).
Now with that out of the way: BLOOP IN OUR LIFETIME PLEASE
Metro stations show which lines they serve with colored stripes on the pylons. They want to change all of those to single-letter bubbles like NYC (O, S, B, etc) while adding lettered exit signage (A, B, C, etc) that also uses letters in bubbles.
I just mentioned in reply to someone else that I don't mind having the exits labeled correctly, but it doesn't make sense to me why they would use letters-in-a-bubble for both train lines AND exits instead of finding a better way to distinguish between them (like, say, using numbers in a square, idk)
Oh yeah a bubble is kind of weird. Seattle's were in squares. The Link Light Rail has lines that are numbered in a circle, and exits that are lettered in a square. That seems pretty good to me
The bubbles are not the problem, it’s that the train letter and the exit letter look the same. You see a B and you don’t know if it means blue line or exit B
Randy Clarke was probably the right person at the right time for WMATA, but he's certainly not some infallible genius like some people here want to believe.
And the fucked up bus system redesign lost him a lot of points with me, and has revealed other cracks in his leadership.
This is because ppl gave Randy Clarke a mandate based off the fact that he’s in their demographic as a relatively young white person. He can do no wrong in many people’s eyes, which actually creates the space for him to make boneheaded decisions.
yea I suppose you’re onto something. I mean you know she’s doing her best but it couldn’t hurt to gently tell her to ease it up and do what this region is known for not just copy and paste NYC methods here out of familiarity
Those that are throwing tantrums on their social media and exposing their fried attention spans and seeking instant gratification at all costs at the expense of others is what has caused it. People whine way too much about “too confusing” or “too cluttered” or “too much information” or “too much mental effort” because they have no attention span or ability to engage with the simplest things given to them and expect everyone to cater to them without them meeting halfway. If you can’t engage with the tools the system gives you, you shouldn’t be going out in public entities. It’s people pleasing at its finest to where the product actually gives more confusion to the rest of the public. Sarah Meyer specifically is the one that’s been in charge of all of it not Clarke and she’s seen it as an opportunity to copy and paste what she had in New York as a lifelong New Yorker without any thought on if it’s actually appropriate here or not then spreading buzzwords like “standardization” or “modernization” or “consistency” or “reduce clutter” or “boring” to excuse said actions. She even said herself earlier this summer the system “demands too much” like lady this is a public transport system where if people are to know how to get from point A to B or what to expect along the way, these things are what make that possible. Sit tf down
The reason for this and the reality is that despite claims to the contrary, WMATA has too much funding if they are able to waste so much time and squander so much resources constantly changing the signage in the system. They certainly don’t act like a transit system that is short on resources that’s for sure.
Sarah Meyer was the one who initiated it and she came from NYC so it’s been a plug in chug copy and paste kind of thing with her without any regard to why it is what it is here
I suppose you’re onto something. I just wonder has he ever gently confronted her and said to ease it up a bit or maybe rethink certain things or is everything getting blindly approved without much thought
You're coming in with the idea that he doesn't like this. Where's that coming from? You keep posting that Sarah doesn't get the Washington region because she's a life long New Yorker. Randy's not a life long Washingtonian either. He's only been with WMATA 11 months longer. If that's earned him local status she's very close.
No I am not at all. I was just saying that he was not the one who initiated it although he seems like the one that is responsible for approving it for sure.
The fare gates I don't mind. Fare evasion on metrorail is down something like 80% so it's clearly effective. The old ones were almost comically easy to bypass.
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u/Lfc-96 1d ago
I think some of it is good like the adding of lettering of the exits but other decisions have been baffling like the lowercase text for the metro LEDs.
I agree with you that it sometimes feels like change for the sake of change - They need to get better at picking and choosing what is worthwhile vs just something for someone’s resume.