The making of the floor navigation in Moscow Metro stations

The story by Ludwig Bystronovsky.

As I have a large Google Drive storage, I’ve got plenty of photos. Let’s roll.

Everyone is in a cheerful mood. Kostya plays an Unusual Passenger.

Mark puts sticky tape on the stairs. (The idea didn’t survive).

Mark never gets into trouble. (The translation: “We are in a police booth, don’t go to Biblioteka station or you’ll end up here too”).

Smart ass. We know that little boys like us don’t often get a chance to spend time in the police booth on the central metro station, so we immediately set off to surrender.

(It turned out that we didn’t have some stupid stamp on our passes and then they found a Ukrainian passport among the documents we submitted for inspection and the suddenly awake policemen put on a 40-minute comic act called “Checking Moscow registration over the phone at 3 a. m.” So that night we didn’t get to blow up the Kremlin with our little stickers).

The “You arrived at the 2nd line” sign (didn’t survive):

Sawdust-tested.

The biggest problem is that the signs get blown away by the wind (the picture depicts the catching).

First we stuck them with oracal, then with adhesive tape, then with masking tape—it proved the best. Two or three rolls were used for one hub.

Yegor demonstrates how cool a red spot would look on the escalator stairs.

We also tried to print text in circles (the idea didn’t survive).

Unusual Passengers:

At some point we had to abandon the tape and and use heavy objects to hold the signs down.

Drawing a steamship.

The opera singer Dmitry Khvorostovsky studies the sign towards Taganskaya station.

A sign on the platform (didn’t survive):

Its dead brother:

Our company looks something like this:

We have to carry with us a big pile of paper in order to check sizes and make new sketches out of old ones. The plotter is busy printing.

The most important thing is managing to lay out and pick up the signs without hindering the cleaning process.

Each session, the pedometer records dozens of travelled kilometers. The process looks like this:

Mark gets into the role:

The ugly hallway on Teatralnaya station lacks navigation for thousands of passengers that transfer through this station every day. The photo shows the first solution that didn’t survive.

The metro takeover plan. With such a picture we mark that the following photos are of the final layout. This way it is easier to find them later in the photostream.

An exciting game called Granite and Pantone:

This way:

That way:

A coin toss decides who shall take all the paper home.

Passengers are intrigued.

Girls come and ask questions. This one even hugged me and offered me a cocktail from a paper cup.

There are a lot of drunk people giving advice.

By the end of the day the sketches are covered with dirt.

Yegor won’t get over the red circle.

It goes like this: we come to a station with one Way Out sign.

And leave with leave with a totally different one.

Then we have to analyze all this.

Small signs indicating the trains’ direction (didn’t survive):

It’s important not only to place signs but to direct passenger flows. Ahead is the sign with an arrow that makes a passenger plan his route in advance.

A fun place where eight routes meet. We managed to get by with minimum signs. I’ll show it to you later.

If you don’t write down where you placed the sign at night, you won’t remember it in the morning.

It’s important to link each concrete slab to the arrangement of tiles. We need to know the dimensions of tiles, arrangement of columns, floor pattern and a host of other things.

Then this way again:

Then that way:

Once again, this way. 49 stations to go:

I feel like a paper factory courier. I dream about metro toilets with cold water and soviet signs, catacombs populated with metro guards and technical trains. I learned the arrangement of platforms and direction of trains at Kitay-Gorod hub, which I failed to do in the previous 20 years I've lived in Moscow.

I used to look at metro vestibules as all people do.

And now I see them as a place to put “B-Ох-Те2” and “В-Ох-Те4”.

(It stays for “signs 2 and 4 in Okhotny Ryad–Teatralnaya vestibule”).

Ok, so much for it. Kostya hints that we have to come up to the surface.

Although it’s all the same here.

Part V