June 25, 2008
The TTC Has a New Subway Map
...and it's rather unfortunate. Spacing reports that the TTC has begun to update its subway route map in subway cars—with a much uglier font, slightly more clutter, and a messy new treatment of addresses. To wit on the latter point:
...visual clutter is increased by the new addresses on the maps. The TTC did away with just displaying the approximate address numbers along Yonge, Bloor, Danforth and Sheppard (only printing the street name where the subway deviated form one of those four streets), and now has the precise municipal address for each station. Coxwell Station now has a Strathmore Boulevard address, in of 1568 Danforth Avenue, and Rosedale is now at 7 Crescent Road instead of 1009 Yonge.More not-too-kind analysis, as Spacing points out, is on 299 Bloor Call Control.
This new system is useless when looking for the closest station to an address on Bloor or Danforth. On Yonge, this is especially redundant, as not only are the stations already named for the cross streets, Yonge is also the origin point for addresses east and west of that street. So knowing that Dundas Station is actually at 3 Dundas Street East is not that helpful.
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Er, I dunno, the new font isn't that ugly.
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Re the article on Spacing: has anyone else ever read that Memorial@Home ad and realized how close it is to saying MEMORIAL HOME? Sorry, that's been a longtime gripe of mine. Who wants to get their education from a Memorial Home?
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I thought I was just going crazy. I asked my sister if the map font looked different, she shrugged and said "I dunno"... looks like I was right. The bolder letters and tighter spacing make it harder to read from a distance. I never really paid attention to the addresses before, but just having the approximate street number on yonge/bloor/danforth/etc instead of the exact address was much less cluttered.
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These things are supposed to get incrementally better, not incrementally worse. Whoever is responsible for this new map is dumber than a bag of hammers .....
Cheers,
Tuds
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Looks like a subway map of Lolcat captions.
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Maybe this is the first step towards renaming stations to corporate sponsors? Putting the exact address of the station would be to help people understand where it is (although still a terrible method) if the station name was changed.
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What a mess. Someday soon I hope the TTC hires some graphic designers.