Paint-and-Metal User Experience Design for Better Driving in a GPS App World
My recent trip to Washington, D.C. over Labor Day weekend had me thinking about the intersection of user experience design and urban planning. A years-long overhaul to the Metro is currently going on due to multiple fires in the tunnels (you can’t make this stuff up), which makes it not so ideal for getting around, as stations and sometimes whole lines are closed down for construction. Many attribute the fires to the fact that the Metro is old and the city has put bandaid upon bandaid on it to fix problems that have arisen over the years.
So, the friend that I was visiting drove me all over the city to do touristy things. And oh! The road rage that ensued.
The neighborhoods and buildings in and around D.C. date back to the infancy of our country. They can be traced back to 1790 when the Residence Act was passed by the First Congress. The choice to put the capitol on the banks of the Potomac River was a compromise between the northern and southern delegations, an event that Hamilton fans will recognize from its second act. Pierre L’Enfant, a French architect, was appointed by George Washington to plan the city. According to Pierre L’Enfant’s Wikipedia page, “[His] plan specified that most streets would be laid out in a grid... Diagonal broader avenues, later named after the states of the Union, crossed the grid. The diagonal avenues intersected with the north-south and east-west streets at circles and rectangular plazas that would later honor notable Americans and provide open space.” Sounds great, right? L’Enfant’s grandiose vision, which included designs for many of the important buildings (actually not part of his assignment by Washington), is quite lovely to look at aesthetically even if those diagonal streets might give modern urban drivers cause for pause. But they provided for green space and beautiful plazas where you could put epic statues!, L’Enfant would say. But it looks like the European cities of my homeland!, L’Enfant would say.
Yeah, ok, L’Enfant.
Now, take that plan that L’Enfant left us with, subtract horses, add cars, a sprawling Metro and train system, and nearly 90 times the population (plus all those tourists and folks from Maryland and Virginia who commute in to the city to work), and you have the headache that is modern D.C. driving. The layout of roads go from frustrating to downright puzzling. It quickly became obvious to me that the Metro was not the only transportation agency that had been putting bandaids on their system for decades. D.C. driving is challenging as it is: there are A LOT of cars, A LOT of tourists walking and biking around, and, perhaps most frustratingly, A LOT of tourists driving who are unfamiliar with the confusing and non-intuitive setup of intersections and highways exits and entrances.
Add to that a litany of complaints that can’t be chalked up to drivers, pedestrians, or bike riders:
-Confusing, hard-to-read, or non-existent signage along roads
-Non-existent signage isn’t just reserved for drivers. Drivers often come upon tourists standing in the middle of intersection looking for the signage that isn’t there
-Faded or non-existent painted lines indicating parking lanes or lane separations
-Black and unmarked speed bumps that send your car flying through the air
-Lanes that change into turn-only lanes with very little warning
-Roads that fork, and fork again, and again and again and again
-The number of potholes per capita is probably in the nation’s top 3. Some of those are frighteningly deep abysses.
-Numerous intersections where more than two streets meet. This lane turns where exactly…?
-Traffic circles. So many traffic circles.
-Extreme angle turns, where a stop light, stop sign, or exit will seem to jump out of nowhere
-Non-intuitive routes for getting from one major road to another, which often include quickly merging onto and exiting off of at least one intermediary road before getting to the road you need to get to. Sometimes, this means you have to head in the opposite direction you ultimately want to go, which leads to confusion.
No wonder you can’t drive for five minutes without someone pulling an erratic-seemingly-out-of-nowhere U-turn in the middle of traffic. It’s enough to make the happiest-go-luckiest of us all rage.
So is there a solution for this driving nightmare? Probably not an easy one, or it would have been done already. And probably not a cheap one either. As a design grad student though, this is my time to cogitate on any number of design problems I see out there if nothing else than for the fun and mind-exercise of it.
The first place my mind went was autonomous cars. People are imperfect drivers, but robots would be perfect, right? Well, maybe. Seeing as how Google Maps can’t even seem to keep up with all the confusing turns one might make for a simple journey across the city, I don’t know that this is a slam dunk, or at least as technology stands right now. In the years between now and when autonomous vehicles become commonplace on the road, this can (and hopefully will) change. But what about for right now, when we are stuck with cars that are wholly dependent on human drivers?
As I mentioned above, there are definitely some improvements that can be made to GPS navigation apps. Because many of the maneuvers required are unexpected and sudden, an app with directions more like a human would give rather than the raw data directions a robot gives would be helpful. For example, how much easier would your drive be if your mapping app gave you visual cues (besides road signs, which aren’t always consistent) to look for? What about crowdsourced descriptive directions? For example, “After the extreme right turn, immediately turn left at the first street” or “Merge onto Main Street and then quickly exit again to the right onto Elm Street.” Making our robots a little less robotic would make the experience of a lot of D.C. drivers much more pleasant.
It’s true — to fix the entire system could be impossible, short of razing the beautiful art deco buildings, historical institutions, and unique townhouses that make D.C. what it is. However, there are some pretty simple fixes for some of the above gripes that would involve a little paint and metal. Stealthy speed bumps? Faded lane lines? A little bright paint goes a long way. Big, easy-to-read signs too. Confusing interchanges? Something I have noticed being used increasingly in Denver is signs moving to the pavement. Where C-470 meets I-70 and 6th Avenue used to be an unpleasant experience in cars cutting you off as they changed lanes at the last moment. With the addition of giant road signs painted onto each lane far ahead of the interchange, those surprise lane changes have now been vastly cut down. Drivers are looking at the road anyway, so why not put the information they need there?
This is all just ideation, but that’s where you have to start. Who knows? Maybe one day, this design program will land me at the intersection of user design and urban planning.
