alt Hacker NewsSingapore subway (mrt) information display types
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Singapore MRT or SMRT literally means DEATH in Czech.
First heard about that from a friend during his travel presentation about Singapore. They found it amusing but little worrying, that if you ride the metro there, you are riding with death. ;-)
Why are plasma displays being used? I would expect they would burn in rapidly.
Why are all the displays placed at 90°? That seems like bad UX.
Multivariate testing
I wish they hadn't got rid of STARIS 1[1]. It was highly intuitive and informative, and showed you everything you needed at a glance, and was visible from nearly anywhere within the carriage.
In fact I am not very happy with the little things when it comes to LTA.
They ruined MRT wayfinding with highly abstract symbols[2] in the new Thomson-East Coast Line, so much so that station staff have had to regularly supplant it with ugly printed signs that aren't standardised. They also changed from using alphabetical exits to numbered exits, with no listing of nearby landmarks. Older stations still have this wayfinding, but I suspect they will be replaced in short order, as everything in Singapore is wont to be.
Speaking of standardised, LTA have two corporate typefaces: LTA Identity, and Ocean Sans. They stopped using both and moved to Stroudley, which just looks bad, with ugly vertical terminators on the 'a', 'e', and 'g' glyphs. Ocean Sans is simultaneously superbly readable and yet very distinctive, something very few fonts have achieved.
I must also be in the minority but I do not like the new map[3]; it makes the city centre too cluttered. I much prefer the one from ~2010[4], which is quite reminiscent of the London Underground's map. In fact I believe they could've simplified it further by getting rid of station codes. Which passenger needs to know Dhoby Ghaut is NE6/CC1/NE24? Even as a (self-professed) transport nerd I don't really care.
I have other rants about the giant stroads, weird cycling paths, and their decision to use 'anticlockwise' and 'clockwise' for the full Circle Line, but that is neither here nor there, and I think other creators discuss that better than I ever could. Singapore's public transport is great, no doubt, but it could be so much better still. It needs trams.
[1]: https://blog.sgtrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/c151-st...
[2]: https://www.sgtrains.com/guide-wayfinding.html
[3]: https://blog.sgtrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/05-sm-2...
[4]: https://blog.sgtrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/03-Netw...
I preferred the old style route display (DRMD panels, apparently) over the LCD displays.
Main reason: The most important info was always on display.
Also loved it when the new route map depicted the circle line as a circle [1].
[1] https://blog.sgtrains.com/2020/06/system-maps-over-the-years...