Branding your city, whether through logos, trademarks or historical importance, helps convey a place’s cultural values, but is also essential in competing for desirable tourism and investment dollars. When communicating this brand, the details matter, right down to the signage systems employed at neighborhood levels. Philadelphia already has high quality, unified walking and vehicular wayfinding signage systems that were long ago established. More recently, the Central Philadelphia Transportation Management Association (
CPTMA), in partnership with regional transit service providers, set to increase visibility of and access to Philly’s multi-modal, regional transit system as well, and visually link it to the City’s existing wayfinding systems.
CPTMA’s goal was simple: create a single brand of Philly’s transit systems by highlighting and unifying access to underground transit in Center City. The ‘highlighting’ part has come in the form of visually intriguing, green back-lit “lollipop” signs that mark entrances to Philly’s 3.5 mile underground concourse system that links together the subway, trolley lines and regional rail. The ‘unifying’ part has come in the form of the “lollipop” signs, but also information at the surface as to which train lines users can access at each stop; information about the
Walk! Philadelphia and
Direction Philadelphia sign systems that can be followed by pedestrians and cars; and below the surface, maps of the 3.5 mile underground concourse as well as attractions found above ground around each stop. By the end of September, after years of implementation efforts, the signage system will officially be complete.
Selling the brand wasn’t always easy, according to Paul Levy, President and CEO of Center City District (
CCD). When CCD originally approached
SEPTA and
PATCO about creating a unified signage system to be shared by the two transit authorities, all parties were on board. But, as Levy describes, neither party wanted to erase their individual identity. Through a series of negotiations and back and forth conversations, the transit authorities and CCD eventually reached a compromise to retain each transit providers brand, but on unified physical signs. Thus the green “lollipop” and associated directional signage came to be. All parties: pleased; a unified brand: defined.
Today, with nearly 90 percent of signs installed, Levy owes a great deal of thanks to a number of property owners and their “willingness to share the cost of installing the system adjacent to their buildings,” likely because they understood the benefit of the unified system. And he hopes more potential partners will come on board in the future. “We’ve shared the system with Temple, Drexel, Penn and the University City District and have encouraged them to extend it.”
Source: Paul Levy, President and CEO of Center City District
Writer:
Greg Meckstroth