By Jung Gatoona

After spending much time riding and checking out the new stations of Metro's Eastside extension for the Gold Line, it has come to my attention that one of the most confusing and worst designed stations of them all is the Little Tokyo / Arts District station. It's as if the station was purposely designed to resemble a sort of lab rat maze where the prize is not cheese, but an oncoming train. Luckily no one has been hit, yet, and it can stay that way if some quick improvements are added by Metro.

The main problem with this station for pedestrians is its confusing entrance and exit ways, especially for newcomers. I myself found it confusing the first time and took the wrong way out, and upon my stay at the station for quite some time, I noticed many others failed to properly enter and exit the station as well.

Below is a picture of the station's entrance path. As illustrated, the green arrow is the correct and safe path that pedestrians should take, and the red arrow is the incorrect and dangerous path that many newcomers have taken because of the station's horrible design.

Below is a picture of the station's exit path with the same added illustrations as above.

Upon studying the pedestrian movements and asking those who missed it questions, it became clear that most people went the wrong path because they were unable to see the swinging gates along the fences of the correct path. To those who are in a hurry or are a first to the station, the gates are practically invisible to them as it is the same color as the fences. As evident in one case, I corrected two seniors who were trying to enter the station, and upon walking on the correct path, they had walked past the gates, unaware that they had just missed the entrance way to the station.

As seen from the picture below, one can easily see why some people would walk along the tracks rather than go behind the fence and open the gate to enter or exit the station.

The problems in this station is clear, but so are the solutions to fix it. My suggestion to Metro for this problem is to create more visual signs that point to the right directions. After all, we as humans communicate better when we are presented with visualizations. For examples of visualizations, the photo below provides some suggestions on what Metro can do. They can paint footsteps on the pavement that lead pedestrians into the right path, and they can add a few extra arrows to point people into the right direction. These solutions are not only effective to the problem, but cost effective and quick to build and maintain as well.

Illustration & Photo | Jung Gatoona