Terrible Signage on the Chicago Metra
I came across this bit of terrible signage for the Metra train today when I went out to Libertyville for work. Metra is the Chicagoland area’s commuter train; it gets people from downtown to the burbs and back, if you can figure out the signage 
This diagram shows how the signs were set up, and where I was in relation to the signs. Note that I kept the lettering in its actual physical direction as to not confuse the issues here any further by adapting the diagram for explanatory purposes – imagine that you have X-Ray goggles and can see through the “To Chicago” sign in the foreground.
Initially, I just saw the sign on the other side of the tracks (“From Chicago”) and I spent quite a while (and more than a few compute cycles) trying to figure out how to interpret it. After I had resigned myself to just getting on the train when everyone else did (it was the end of the day and I figured most people were heading back home to the city), I found a sign on the same side of the tracks as me that said “To Chicago.” This was significantly clearer.
The “From <City Name>” signage is awful on multiple levels, and I’m going to try to explain them here, along with some suggestions for improvements.
First off, consider the context. People don’t take trains to get from places (well, maybe they do if they’re the protagonist of a country song, but rarely outside of this scenario); they take a train because they want to get to a destination. So, from a cognitive model perspective, providing signage that says “From <City Name>” is missing the point.
But forgetting about the intent, and taking the sign at face value, it’s difficult to even understand what it means. What from Chicago? Is the direction indicated by the arrow where trains from Chicago come from? Or is the direction indicated by the arrow the direction in which trains from Chicago actually travel? The answer is the latter, but back to the first point, there’s a cognitive discord here (for me at least) between the signage indicating the notion of coming from and my goal of going to. It seems that an appropriately (if a bit clumsily) worded sign would look like this:
A better solution still would be to have the two signs read as follows. There is just no need from the “From” approach (Fox Lake is the other terminus of the train):
But there is still some confusion in having two signs on different sides of the track. There wasn’t any platform on the other side of the track, so I’m not quite sure for who’s benefit was the sign placed behind me (the one that said “To Chicago”). Here we must consider the passenger’s behavior: for the most part, when you’re waiting for a train, you stand facing the tracks. Why couldn’t both signs be on the other side of the tracks? In terms of discoverability, the sign behind me was far less discoverable than the sign across the tracks. I spent a couple minutes being very puzzled before I turned around actually and saw the much more intuitively labeled “To Chicago” sign. I think an ideal situation would be one sign, appropriately placed across the tracks, in my line of sight, that read like this.
Clear, concise, to the point, and unambiguous – which is exactly what you want (ideally always, but specifically) when you’re travelling in an unfamiliar place and/or on a prescribed time schedule.
Has anyone else ever been stumped by this? Or am I just a few rides short of a ten-trip?
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