by John Calimente
It takes time to become familiar with a transit system, especially its bus routes. While rail has the advantage of being very legible - one can always see the directions that the rails are headed - buses are another matter. Transit systems try to help by providing route maps at stops, naming routes after their destinations or neighbourhoods they pass through, or through their route numbering system.
In Vancouver, for example, buses with triple-digit route numbers leaving downtown and beginning with 24 are headed for North Vancouver, 25 to West Vancouver, and 13 to Burnaby. Surrey routes start with the number 3 and Richmond routes start with 4. But that’s rather obscure, rather like learning the codes on Coca Cola cans that tell you where and when they were produced.
What bus systems really need is way to make their routing easily understandable even to those who have never ridden them before. I recently found out that Seoul, Korea has implemented a system that goes a long way towards solving the bus legibility problem.
 |
| Seoul bus, by Kaba |
 |
| A green Seoul bus, photo by Visionstyler Press |
some posts about urban transportation in Asia:
No comments:
Post a Comment