(The following article by Patrick McGeehan was circulated by New York Times News Service on June 16.)
NEW YORK — NJ Transit is redesigning its train schedules for the first time in more than 20 years. They will take effect July 3, two days after fares are to go up an average of 11.5 percent.
In a switch, NJ Transit turned to consultants who said they had the mind-set of riders, not engineers or train buffs. The result is a standardized set of schedules for all eight of the state’s main commuter lines.
The schedules, formerly black and white, will be printed in navy-blue type and shaded in varying hues. The focus has changed from individual trains to the places people want to depart and reach.
“The railroad cares about trains, so the old-fashioned timetables were about trains,” said Jim Redeker, an assistant executive director of NJ Transit, “but people want to know about stations.”
Waiting at the Broad Street station in Newark, N.J., for a train to New York on Wednesday, John Cherian of Bloomfield, N.J., glanced at a new schedule and gave his immediate approval.
“This makes much more sense,” he said. “The font is good. The letters are good. It’s much more readable.”
For help, NJ Transit turned to Two Twelve Associates, a Manhattan design firm that specializes in conveying complicated information. (It created New York City’s 600-page bid book for the 2012 Summer Olympics.)
Brian Sisco of Two Twelve, who oversaw the redesign, said the new timetables looked more like those in Europe and Australia. One goal, he said, was to shrink them, “because they had become very big.”
Indeed, the old schedule for the Morris and Essex lines covered 16 sheets of paper that, unlike most train schedules, had to be folded and stapled as a booklet. The Northeast Corridor schedule was rapidly approaching that point, Redeker said.
The new editions of those schedules fit onto a 27-inch-wide sheet of recycled paper that folds like an accordion to fit into a breast pocket.
Eliminating the staples, which required the use of outside printers, will save NJ Transit at least $150,000 a year, Redeker said.