I recently came across an article about the new wayfinding signs that Winnipeg has installed. There are 101 spread out through the city, but mostly concentrated in the downtown and more urban/tourist areas.
What piqued my interest was the price tag and length it took to complete the project: $943,000 and four years. That’s nearly $10,000 per sign and nearly $700,000 more than originally budgeted. This had one city councillor calling them “way-losing” signs instead.
While I recognize that there needs to be a lot of feedback with accessibility groups and signage consultants, this seems like one of those projects that sticks in the craw of taxpayers. I usually dismiss folks like councillor Rob Ford who say we can save $100,000 if the City didn’t serve fruit and coffee at public meetings, but this Winnipeg example is one that residents should feel free to complain about.
The question I pose to Spacing Wire readers: does Toronto have good wayfinding signage? And do you know of cities that have implemented good wayfinding signs?
10 comments
toronto has lots of nice people who happily respond to requests for directions. that’s a nicer and cheaper way to navigate than signs, right?
I was in Pittsburgh recently and found their wayfinding signage extremely helpful – directions to neighbourhoods are well marked (imagine if there were signs pointing to, say, The Annex from Parkdale or The Beaches). Rarely had to look at the map.
Here’s an example, though many listed more than one neighbourhood.
every time i notice a good wayfinding sign, i come to realize how few there are in this city…
some of us know this city quite well. however, i can’t imagine trying to find an area/neighbourhood/place of significance in this city if I’ve barely been here before.
i don’t think Toronto lacks severely, i just think it could probably be better
According to the article in the Winnipeg Free Press, the $943,000 amount also includes funds for an unstated amount of interior signs as well as various kiosks in different parts of the city. So, the $10,000 per sign figure suggested above is inflated quite a bit. A recent City of Winnipeg press release states that the cost for the manufacture and installation of the exterior signs will be $391,200 ($3,873.27 for each sign). Moreover, the City says that 7 more locations will be added, bringing the total number of locations to 91. It still seems like an awful lot of money for a bunch of aluminum signs… but entirely plausible. I think this example speaks to the more general concern about how we will be able to afford to maintain and improve our basic public infrastructure into the future while the political and business establishment continues to undermine and undervalue public goods and local governance.
I was recently in Winnipeg and to be honest, didn’t notice the signs very much. Maybe im just an absent minded tourist.
paris is fantastic for that. every major square (chà ¢telet, bastille, concorde), train station (nord, montparnasse, austerlitz) and sometimes even neighbourhood (les halles) has giant signs pointing to another. in addition, if there’s a more direct route for cyclists or pedestrians, those ones are posted too!
mkm>I really do like giving directions. But once I send people off I spend 10 minutes 2nd guessing myself, thinking of better more efficient directions I could have given, and feeling guilty I couldn’t perform in top form under pressure.
Matt
Wayfinding signage is a tricky business – look at the uproar over the street sign replacement project here. It’s not surprising in some ways that it cost so much – doing it right involves a lot of consultation, and the cost of manufacturing them is not the biggest issue (although with the price of metal these days maybe we should be examining recycled plastic).
I find some Toronto road signs very difficult compared to European ones because the fonts and signs are too small to be easily read, especially those denoting parking restrictions since that manoeuvre usually involves a lot of cognitive processing (traffic, pedestrians, estimating space vs car length, checking for hydrants…) Given an aging population this is something that’s going to get important.
In 2002 Dublin City Council tried to implement orbital route signage but used non-standard signs and had to junk the lot – five years later the posts holding them up hadn’t been removed yet!
If we did it here it would probably end up being the subject of a Joe Clark piece or the subject of a showdown with the province’s transportation bureaucrats unless we broke with tradition and got both inside the tent from the start.
I like the idea of Semapedia.org – unobtrusive, opt-in, cheap as dirt and most have access if they have a camera equipped cellphone. I wonder if the new Google ‘Zoom In’ feature could be used to view 8.5″ x 11.0″ Semacodes? You could use it as a robots.txt file
to disallow Google from cataloging items!
“Downtown Parkade Route” is a point of interest in the ‘peg?