Luas Signage

parsi · 30-09-2004 9:02am #1

I was up in Dublin the other night and we decided to get the Luas into town from Ranelagh and a few things struck me :

- no signposting for the station itself - not even a protruding sign over the entrance,

- you go in and you're faced with blank walls and two stairways with no indication of which one is for which direction,

- the platforms don't have signs saying "northbound" "citybound" or whatever,

- the electronic displays on the southbound platform was out of action and the other one was informing us of when the last tram was - not really useful,

- yer woman in the ticket machine has a strange accent - I nearly jumped when she boomed out "thunk you, please take your change and ticket" :-)

Trams themselves are nice....

pork99 · 30-09-2004 9:09am

Information graphics - nobody gets it in this country not even the "designers" - actually especially not the "designers"

D8 boy · 30-09-2004 1:14pm

parsi

Agree entirely. It's a shame to spend €750M on a fine system and then skimp on simple (and relatively cheap) details like signposting and information provision.

There appear to be no directional signs at any stop on the Green line. The electronic displays are frequently out of action and I have never once heard the public address system being used even when the service is disrupted. The on-board displays and external are frequently wrong, often managing to both show *different* erroneous information.

The Connex customer phone line is only open 9-5, the Luas website is not updated with any service information (bizzarely, www.aaroadwatch.ie does have fairly up-to-date details) and emails to info@luas.ie are ignored.

I notice some stops on the Red line have very ugly and amateurish signs saving "Tallaght", etc. Dunno whether they are waiting for something more permanent.

To be honest it's not just a problem with Luas. We seem to have a national problem with signage. Arriving off a plane at Dublin Airport you are greeted by a visual cacaphony of signs, with no consistent font or corpororate
identify. Most DART stations are practically invisible. Every bus operator erects its own stop in its own style and often with no service information.

And most of us could write a thesis about Irish road signage ...!

Winters · 30-09-2004 1:18pm

parsi wrote:

yer woman in the ticket machine has a strange accent - I nearly jumped when she boomed out "thunk you, please take your change and ticket" :-)

She sounds quite like Mary Harney imo.

enterprise · 30-09-2004 1:31pm

parsi wrote:

I
- yer woman in the ticket machine has a strange accent - I nearly jumped when she boomed out "thunk you, please take your change and ticket" :-)

QUOTE]

Where you expecting a woman with a Cork accent to greet you?

In fairness, while signage could be better, just look at the DMD (Dot Matrix Display) on the front of the tram for its destination - there have been a few problems with these but it has got a lot better over the last few weeks.

The CIS (Customer information displays) are fairly unreliable and do need to be improved - there goes a day without one being out of action on the green line.

dub45 · 30-09-2004 1:56pm

D8 boy wrote:

parsi

Agree entirely. It's a shame to spend €750M on a fine system and then skimp on simple (and relatively cheap) details like signposting and information provision.

There appear to be no directional signs at any stop on the Green line. The electronic displays are frequently out of action and I have never once heard the public address system being used even when the service is disrupted. The on-board displays and external are frequently wrong, often managing to both show *different* erroneous information.

The Connex customer phone line is only open 9-5, the Luas website is not updated with any service information (bizzarely, www.aaroadwatch.ie does have fairly up-to-date details) and emails to info@luas.ie are ignored.

I notice some stops on the Red line have very ugly and amateurish signs saving "Tallaght", etc. Dunno whether they are waiting for something more permanent.

To be honest it's not just a problem with Luas. We seem to have a national problem with signage. Arriving off a plane at Dublin Airport you are greeted by a visual cacaphony of signs, with no consistent font or corpororate
identify. Most DART stations are practically invisible. Every bus operator erects its own stop in its own style and often with no service information.

And most of us could write a thesis about Irish road signage ...!

James St is one of the few areas in the City where the luas and other road users share a lane which is very very narrow. There is no warning of this as road users approach the lane - it is particularly dangerous for cyclists. There is a complicated entrace exit system at James Hospital no warning as motorists approach.

Steeven's lane has two 'no entry signs' at the top yet there is access permitted as it is essential to access the entrance to St Patrick's hospital and Dublin City Council has even put in new road markings!

There does not seem to have been any advabce thought given to a consistent signage strategy for the Luas system and God knows they have had long enough to plan for it.

It would also be interesting to know how much money has been wasted on temporary signage which for the most part has been useless!

daymobrew · 30-09-2004 2:40pm

parsi:
Write to Luas Customer Care (http://www.luas.ie/document/index.asp?head=11) and let them know. They may not realise (or want to acknowledge) the problem.

Having said that I wrote to them 3 months ago about the Routes/Maps web page not appearing correctly in Mozilla Firefox but no action has been taken. They did fix a load of typos before the first line opened.

Aside, for web nerds: The page is massive because of the millions of unnecessary style sheet tags (I reduced it from 53k to 17k). I guess it was created in Word and exported. The tables with the stations are aligned with some style sheet stuff, not the smaller (html codewise) 'table' tags. PDF file sizes given as 'Ko' (French abbreviation for kilobytes) instead of 'KB' or 'Kb'.
I'll omit the rest because this aside is getting bigger than my post.

mackerski · 30-09-2004 4:20pm

daymobrew wrote:

PDF file sizes given as 'Ko' (French abbreviation for kilobytes) instead of 'KB' or 'Kb'.
I'll omit the rest because this aside is getting bigger than my post.

Best for them to standardise on the big B. Can't be many people who need to know the size in kilobits...

Dermot

parsi · 30-09-2004 6:11pm

enterprise wrote:

parsi wrote:

I
- yer woman in the ticket machine has a strange accent - I nearly jumped when she boomed out "thunk you, please take your change and ticket" :-)

QUOTE]

Where you expecting a woman with a Cork accent to greet you?

In fairness, while signage could be better, just look at the DMD (Dot Matrix Display) on the front of the tram for its destination - there have been a few problems with these but it has got a lot better over the last few weeks.

The CIS (Customer information displays) are fairly unreliable and do need to be improved - there goes a day without one being out of action on the green line.

I wouldn't mind an accent that could be understood !

Yes, I was on the correct platform because I knew we had left-hand running and which direction town was. However if I was a tourist or visitor I wouldn't know which tram to take until I saw the destination on the front display and then might have had to cross the tracks and may have got run over by another tram that just happened to sneak in (my best "Sun" exaggeration here..)

Luas Signage

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