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rfmcdonaldI've been able to find my way in the PATH network, with the provisos that I literally was trained to do this kind of thing in Scouts and that I had help. For others, like Spacing Toronto's Kieran Delamont, I can easily get the idea of becoming lost.
This summer, a pilot project will be launched to test a new wayfinding system in the PATH — Toronto’s subterranean navigation-slash-commercial network of tunnels, shops, and food courts. The system, currently being called #PATH360, will dispense with some of the more frustrating aspects of the current system (which hasn’t seen a major upgrade since the 1990s) and will implement what designers hope will be an easier to navigate, clearer, and simpler approach to wayfinding in the PATH.
Designed by Steer Davies Gleave, the system is touted as “the first step toward a world-class wayfinding system,” by James Brown, the principal consultant on the project. “It’s really a very important part of urban infrastructure,” says the Toronto Financial District BIA’s executive director Grant Humes. “This is about helping people move through the space” and “place the PATH within the context of the city.” By forging more links with the above-ground TO360 wayfinding system (the new downtown map totem system was also designed by Steer Davies Gleave) and with the city’s subway system, the hope is that the PATH will become a more integrated part of city navigation. The first step, beginning this summer, is a pilot project to test the new map and signage system. By 2018, designers and the BIA hope that the existing signage in the PATH will be replaced with the new system.
This will come as welcome news to anyone familiar with the uniquely unpleasant experience of navigation within the PATH network. To properly appreciate the announcement, it became necessary to establish a baseline of experience. Perhaps in the name of journalistic science, or perhaps out of sheer self-amusement, Spacing’s editor Matthew Blackett sent me in to the PATH network with a goal: get from the Hilton (at University and Richmond) to One King West (at Yonge and King), then to Bell Trinity Square (beside the Eatons Centre), to Roy Thomson Hall (at Simcoe and King), and back to the Hilton. By Google Maps’ estimation, this walk should take 42 minutes end-to-end in the PATH network — almost exactly the same length of time estimated for the above-ground trek. On the surface, this doesn’t seem so difficult. Hitting these three destinations would be no problem above ground; how much harder could it be underground, where the city has put in signage “developed to provide pedestrians with better ease of use and functionality?”
I have yet to fully forgive Blackett.
