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I would never accuse either the TTC or Metrolinx of having excellent wayfinding standards, nor of being particularly competent organizations. I would say the TTC is only marginally better at choosing station names than Metrolinx (hello Pioneer Village and Vaughan Metropolitan Centre stations vs Metrolinx's Eglinton, Cedarvale and now Don Valley stations).
 
T3G said:
Good thing Metrolinx are famed for their humility????
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I didn't say MX was any different, just that they have already developed a coherent wayfinding program which will be used on 2/6 rapid transit lines in Toronto. The TTC does not have a coherent program and does not seem interested in making it a priority at this time.
 
MisterF said:
The T would be fine if they limited its use to rapid transit. But they use it for transit in general including bus stops. Which is exactly how the TTC logo is used. Neither one is particularly useful to identify subway and LRT stations.
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That would be going against the grain of current trends. Boston plants the T everywhere, including bus stops, which then spread to Vancouver and Seattle (although Seattle doesn't use it for buses). Ottawa always borrowed the idea, but uses an O instead, whereas Metrolinx decided to use T like other cities
 
Kyle Campbell said:
That would be going against the grain of current trends. Boston plants the T everywhere, including bus stops, which then spread to Vancouver and Seattle (although Seattle doesn't use it for buses). Ottawa always borrowed the idea, but uses an O instead, whereas Metrolinx decided to use T like other cities
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Of course the whole T thing started with Boston importing the same T symbol as the Stockholm Metro, but the idea of the T representing all things transit is a North American idea
 
IMG_0680.jpeg

A southbound train at St. Clair West station saying "Line 2 towards Kipling", Tuesday
 
Montreal just does things better. It’s metro feels like a true big city subway system that has design and thought put into it. The GO/Metrolinx/TTC could learn so much about the basics like wayfinding from Montreal. It’s amazing to see how backwards we are as a city. It just feels like Toronto and Ontario governments just don’t understand or value such basics.
 
6ixGod said:
I don’t think the TTC is UNAWARE of this problem. I hope people contributed to this survey and that you all have complained to TTC.

TTC developing a new Wayfinding Strategy to help enhance customer experience

www.ttc.ca www.ttc.ca
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To add on…

The hilarious (and frustrating) thing about the TTC’s wayfinding system is that they had decades…especially during the stagnant ’90s and 2000s….to figure this out. Those were the years when expansion had slowed and pressure was low. Perfect time to plan for the future. Instead? We got a patchwork of inconsistent fonts, clumsy layouts, and confusing signage that still hasn’t been fixed.

And here’s the core issue: Toronto became a large city way too quickly and its institutions haven’t caught up. It’s now the fourth-largest city in North America, but City Hall and the TTC still act like we’re managing a mid-sized town. While the population grew, the skyline transformed, and urbanism exploded, the people making key decisions clung to a cautious, small-town mentality.

We face global city challenges (density, housing, climate, immigration) but leadership keeps delivering piecemeal, reactive solutions. The TTC embodies this perfectly: slow to adapt, risk-averse, and often treating riders as a captive audience instead of users deserving of clarity and care.

Even the basics….like signage….suffer from this mindset. Instead of developing a bold, user-first system, we’ve got stations full of mismatched fonts and contradictory maps. And it’s especially frustrating because Toronto already had an iconic typeface. The original Toronto Subway font — a clean, Futura-inspired design from the 1940s — is beloved and instantly recognizable. But instead of building on it, the TTC buried it under layers of Helvetica, Arial, and other random sans-serifs. The result? Visual clutter where there could have been identity.

My hope is that when the new subway trains arrive, they’ve almost be FORCED to come up with wayfinding. Most of the maps will be digital so they’ll likely HAVE to update everything.


Then again….most of the newer buses have displays, and they’ve made a complete mess of that too.
 
That said, there is a shift happening (slowly, but undeniably). A new generation of Torontonians see the city differently (I’d say late Millennials onwards).

They’ve grown up in a version of Toronto that’s always been a big city….flashy, global, fast-moving….and they expect their public institutions to reflect that. Many have lived in or visited cities with world-class transit and intuitive design, and they know firsthand that Toronto could do better.

This generation isn’t nostalgic for some small-town version of the city because they never experienced it. The mindset is changing. Toronto doesn’t have to settle for “good enough” anymore. But until that vision fully breaks through the layers of cautious, risk-averse leadership, the pace of real change will remain frustratingly slow.
 
There is zero need for the TTC to come up with its own way finding standard. There is zero reason for Metrolinx and the TTC and MiWay and YRT etc to all have different standards. This is one of the situations where DoFo should intervene and force one standard on everyone.

I don't necessarily think Metrolinx has a great standard, to be honest. But the mishmash of standards are ridiculous. The Metrolinx standard probably could use some input from the TTC in my opinion. And less help from overpaid consultants. Metrolinx also has a terrible station-naming policy, even though the TTC is similarly guilty of some awful station names, but I think less so than Metrolinx at this point which is using standards for naming GO train stations to name LRT stops, which I think is wrong-minded.
 
Dan416 said:
There is zero need for the TTC to come up with its own way finding standard. There is zero reason for Metrolinx and the TTC and MiWay and YRT etc to all have different standards. This is one of the situations where DoFo should intervene and force one standard on everyone.

I don't necessarily think Metrolinx has a great standard, to be honest. But the mishmash of standards are ridiculous. The Metrolinx standard probably could use some input from the TTC in my opinion. And less help from overpaid consultants. Metrolinx also has a terrible station-naming policy, even though the TTC is similarly guilty of some awful station names, but I think less so than Metrolinx at this point which is using standards for naming GO train stations to name LRT stops, which I think is wrong-minded.
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I think if you look at really successful wayfinding systems they all have one thing in common: a single standard across an entire regional network.

Transport for London, Metro Vancouver Translink, Transport for New South Wales, etc.

This is the core of the issue with wayfinding in the GTA (and in all honesty, transit operations in general). TTC, Metrolinx, YRT, MiWay, and other small suburban agencies all want their own identities and control over their own fiefdoms.

I know Metrolinx is wildly unpopular, but I do think the better future for the GTA is one where all agencies are dissolved and then restructured in a redesigned, reorganized "Metrolinx 2.0"
 
goodcitywhenfinished said:
I know Metrolinx is wildly unpopular, but I do think the better future for the GTA is one where all agencies are dissolved and then restructured in a redesigned, reorganized "Metrolinx 2.0"
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Apart from forcing a unified identity (which is window dressing) onto all transit agencies, how exactly would this materially improve transit?
 
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