i love taking my friends into the PATH. they always wonder how i get around that place, with all those twists and turns around stores and food courts.
my only words of advice is to actually take an hour or two and walk around the system to familiarize yourself with it.
This is not a good thing!
Your suggestion is super for people who live or work down there, who might expect to have to use it all the time. But it's criminal how poorly marked and mapped it is. Oh there are marks and there are maps - but they utterly and completely FAIL to efficiently direct a person to where they want to go.
Has anyone seen how the London Underground maps evolved over the past 100 years, until they reached a form that is so useful, easily understood by all, and so simple that the style is now copied by every single subway system in the world?
Yeah - the PATH mapping people need to get out of their cubicles and go find a better mapping/directions system that works right from the get go. There are thousands of other cities and mapped buildings/complexes in the world, surely someone has already discovered a better way.
I'm a damn smart person with an excellent sense of direction, and once a year when I end up in the PATH, looking hard at the maps trying to make my way to a location close to the above ground location I'm headed to, I FAIL. Oh I get there eventually. But it's painful, slow, and has lots of wrong turns. That would not happen if the maps were useful.
The main problem
with the map is that (and I want to scream this)... they are all missing "you are here" stickers. Oh there's text that says "you are here", but the icon beside it and the icon on the map itself - are totally missing.
Furthermore and just as important, the shapes of the buildings we are under are absolutely useless in helping us figure out where we are and most importantly where the actual next turn is. We're trying to follow the green lines right? There's no way in heck from the map to figure out where the green-line-corner you next need to turn at - which of the ten corners you pass is actually the one you want. For ever intersection of green lines on the map, there are ten underground intersections that lead off into 9 dead ends.
They'd improve things a lot if they flat out pained the green lines on the floor to follow! "AHA! Here's the
REAL intersection from the map I've been looking for! And there's exactly which branch to take!"
I should say - I am impressed by and I do like the fact that they've got color coded "North/South/East/West" markers. But it seems like that's the only thing done right. (Anyone know of a simple/mnemonic system of remembering which color is which direction?)
I should write a letter.... instead of ranting pointlessly on a forum
grey said:
Anyone with an IQ higher than that of mustard can navigate the system.
Baloney!! All of the retail shops and other things create a maze within the maze that hide "the one path" that's supposedly represented on the maps. It's totally unusable by a first time user - not unless they have LITERALLY 3 times the amount of time available to make it to their destination as they would require to walk aboveground.
If I'm in a hurry, winter or not, no way in hell will I go down into the path unless it's a specific route I've taken before and remember. It's unusable to get somewhere more than a block away in a timely manner unless you've walked that specific route once before.
