Metro Transit wants to make it easier to find your bus or train

By Tim Harlow | Minnesota Star Tribune (TNS)

For Metro Transit riders arriving in downtown Minneapolis or St. Paul, transferring can be confusing.

Riders often ask bus drivers, talk to fellow passengers or call Metro Transit to find out how to get to their destination and where to catch their next ride.

“It’s a common question” received at the agency’s Transit Information Center, said Ben Rajkowski, director of Metro Transit’s customer experience department. “We have heard ... inconsistent wayfinding to be a pain point, especially when having to transfer modes.”

To address that, Metro Transit is using a $400,000 Regional Solicitation Grant from the Met Council to come up with a plan to create a “clear, intuitive and accessible wayfinding system” to help riders in both downtowns locate bus stops, stations and transit hubs.

What that will ultimately look like is still being determined. It could include everything from new streamlined signs and maps to informational kiosks and large adhesive stickers on platform and station floors pointing the way. Digital tools such as the “Stop ID” feature on NexTrip could also get an upgrade.

Some of those elements are being piloted at the West Bank, Mall of America, Sun Ray and Uptown transit stations.

“You may be hesitant to use a new line out of fear of not knowing what to do,” said Jasna Hadzic-Stanek, who serves as a senior project administrator in Metro Transit’s customer experience department.

Whether somebody is a daily or first-time user or visitor, the objective of the new effort is for riders “to quickly know what to do without having to use their phone or ask for directions,” she said. “At the end, the goal is to reduce missed connections and reduce rider confusion.”

Over the next year, Metro Transit will lean on a consultant, explore ideas used by other transit agencies, such as the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority in Philadelphia, and gather customer feedback. The agency is seeking volunteers to participate in a focus group. For those with opinions, but not much time, Metro Transit has opened an online survey on the project website where riders can chime in on what makes transit wayfinding easy and what makes it difficult.

“Please consider announcing transfers between lines in downtown ... from Blue and Green to Orange, C, D and E and vice versa,” one of the 67 comments left as of Friday read. “A lot of people don’t know some of these lines exist or how to navigate them when they do know of them because ... downtown’s transit patterns are so lattice-like.”

Another rider bemoaned trying to figure out which of the trio of stops on 6th Street between Jackson and Robert streets in downtown St. Paul to use.

“When one stop has significant infrastructure and the other is a simple signpost, it’s easy to miss that some buses do not use the more obvious stop,” a poster wrote. “I have missed several buses here due to trying to catch the bus at the wrong one of the three stops on this block.”

It’s issues like these that Metro Transit is trying to tackle, but wayfinding is more than just putting up signs, Hadzic-Stanek said.

It includes balancing signs that give enough information but not too much. It’s determining where wayfinding is needed and pinpointing when customers might need a few extra steps, such as in downtown St. Paul, where there are not as many recognizable landmarks as in Minneapolis, she said.

“We need to hear from all people,” Hadzic-Stanek said. “We need it to be data-informed. We want to do it right.”

And that is why it will take until next year before updated wayfinding will show up in the downtowns.

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