A Gray Tale: Metrolinx’s allergy to good design

My main gripe with Metrolinx is the fact that they choose to use white OR gray tile in every piece of infrastructure that they build. My main issue with this is the fact that it makes each station extremely boring.

Building an identity

What color does to a station cannot be understated in our communities. The use of color has always carried cultural connotations, from the colors of flags, to emotions and other uses (color analysis). I’ve grown up riding the Hong Kong MTR, a system that heavily relies of color theming to build identity to make it easier for people to identify individual stations. Causeway Bay will always be lilac, and Sheung Shui will always be a light blue in my mind.

Connecting our communities with color would have gone a long way in establishing transit in the roots of our placemaking efforts. The original Yonge subway tiles, first installed when the subway began operations back in 1954, stayed true to this theming – utilitarian designs, but with each station having a different color trim and tile, it helped establish a sense of identity to each station. TMU (formerly Dundas)’s iconic highlighter yellow tiles is another good (albeit ugly) example of how color shapes places in our mind.

Meanwhile…

Riding the new TTC Line 6 Finch West, it was pretty clear how much value-engineering took place on the line. Disregarding the main issues of the line, the issue I take with the design of the line is the fact that each station has no character. The surface stops are modern, simple, and clean, with black shelters made with metal and glass.

My main issue is that they could have very easily made small, unique changes to each station by changing the colors of some glass panels to add character to each station. St. Clair’s rebuild included artwork at the top of each shelter panel to represent the neighborhoods that the streetcar line runs through, which added character to an otherwise monotonous piece of infrastructure. Big infrastructure projects shouldn’t just be reliable, but also work as placemakers for the communities it serves.

What can Metrolinx do?

Honestly, I don’t mind the vinyls that Sound Transit (temporarily) applied to their stations during openings. The vinyls act as a cheap way to add character and color to each station. I would love it if Metrolinx / Mosaic Transit Partners could work in similar vinyls for each station stop. It doesn’t even need to be anything special – just a different color for each stop.

If Metrolinx wants to claim that they can design high-quality rapid transit, what’s the point of half-assing it? Why build stations that are as drab and utilitarian as the road itself? We had a once-in-a-Canadian-lifetime opportunity to build a rapid transit line Northwest Etobicoke could be proud of, and like most things, we’ve failed to take pride in our work and do it correctly.