Better Bus Stop Signs

I strongly believe in making urban services transparently legible and quickly understood. When I first moved to Ithaca, bus stop signs lacked any information other than reading "Bus Stop." As a result, identifying bus stop locations was a difficult task. This became especially clear when one day I witnessed a person run into the middle of the street to catch a bus in the middle of an intersection – I imagine it was because the stop's name was "State and Stewart," but the bus stop was located on State St several yards south from the intersection with Stewart Ave. In the summer of 2016, after studying abroad at Oxford, I reached out to the local transit agency and shared how informative bus stop signs were there: signs showed the name of the stop and the routes that served it. By the end of 2017, I heard back from the agency that they had taken my advice and were including that information on all newly printed signs. Over the course of 2018, all bus stop signs in Tompkins County were replaced with ones that followed my recommendation.