Improving Public Transit Schedules - Timetables People Can Actually Read

There has been extensive research on effective methods for visual information presentation that has lead to the establishment of useful principles for implementation. In the book Human Factors in Engineering and Design, Sanders and McCormick (1993) discuss a number of important visual display features, including typography (e.g. stroke width, font type, size), layout (interletter spacing, interline spacing, logical grouping and layout of information), color, and information grouping. In his book titled "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information", Tufte (1983) uses many examples of good and poor designs to illustrate important factors for quantitative visual presentations. Through these and other references as well as feedback from customer focus groups and surveys, the research team proposes to (1) determine how well current timetables serve both bus riders and non-bus users; (2) identify the major deficiencies in the current timetable design; and (3) develop more effective layout schemes.