The problem
Good intermodal hubs are designed to simplify travel. They bring together buses, rail, trams, and shared mobility services into a single environment.
In theory, these hubs enable seamless journeys. In practice, many passengers experience the opposite. One of the key factors that creates confusion and difficulty, especially for passengers who are unfamiliar with the space, is poor or inadequate signage.
Poor wayfinding remains one of the most underestimated barriers in public transport user experience. The challenge is greatest in large, complex spaces, where first time visitors have no frame of reference and passengers cannot rely on memory alone. When signage is unclear, inconsistent, or poorly positioned, passengers lose time, confidence, and often their connection.
Intuitive navigation should be an integral part of these spaces from the earliest planning stages. Intuitive orientation is always preferable to an excess of signage. But even in spaces planned with excellent intuitive navigation, signage remains necessary to complete the navigation picture.
Many passengers today also rely on digital navigation tools, including wayfinding apps, even inside transfer spaces. Where there is a gap or inconsistency between the information shown in an app and the physical reality of the space, this can intensify confusion and disorientation. Ensuring strong consistency between digital and physical information is therefore essential.
Why it matters
Poor wayfinding has measurable consequences, to name a few: passengers miss transfers, transfer times increase, crowding patterns worsen as passengers cluster in visible areas, and stress levels increase during journeys.
Poor navigation affects all passengers, but the cost is highest for those with mobility challenges. For elderly passengers, people with physical disabilities, parents with strollers, and those carrying heavy luggage, a wayfinding failure is not merely an inconvenience. It translates into a physical toll: longer routes, greater physical effort, and increased fatigue.
When the physical environment fails to guide passengers clearly, digital navigation tools cannot fully compensate. An app may show the correct route, but if the physical space does not confirm or support that route through clear signage and logical layout, passengers are left navigating a gap between what their screen tells them and what they see around them.
Three things that work
1. Design navigation as part of infrastructure planning
Wayfinding should not be an afterthought applied during the final design phase. Effective navigation design begins early, during the spatial planning of hubs. Passenger routes, decision points, and visual lines of sight must be considered together with infrastructure layouts.
Beyond signage, spatial design can support intuitive navigation through a range of elements: colour coding to distinguish zones or modes, walls or floor textures that guide movement along key routes, and art installations that serve as recognisable landmarks within the space. These elements help passengers orient themselves naturally, before they even look for a sign.
2. Design for unfamiliar users
Wayfinding solutions should be developed with a diverse range of personas in mind: elderly passengers, children, people with disabilities, tourists, parents with young children, and others whose needs and navigation behaviours differ significantly from the experienced commuter.
Effective wayfinding prioritises:
- consistent visual language across the entire space and it’s close surrounding
- minimal decision points, reducing the cognitive load at each step
- signage positioned precisely at decision points and at the specific locations where each function or destination becomes relevant, neither too early nor too late
- consistency between physical signage and digital navigation tools, so that what passengers see in an app, matches what they find in the space
When navigation works for first time visitors and occasional passengers, it works for everyone.
3. Test navigation through real passenger journeys
One of the most effective tools in public transport user experience analysis is simply observing how people move. Passenger journey mapping, walkthrough simulations, and user testing, including spatial simulations in which real users navigate a proposed environment using a draft signage scheme, allow planners to evaluate wayfinding design before anything is built. These methods give planners the opportunity to assess whether a signage scheme is sufficient, missing key information, or confusing for some or all user groups, long before passengers encounter the consequences in practice.
Testing routes between modes, bus to rail, rail to tram, shared mobility to station entrances, often exposes critical gaps that drawings alone cannot reveal.
The bottom line
Intermodal hubs succeed when passengers can move through them confidently, without stopping to think about where to go next. Wayfinding is not a graphic layer. It is core infrastructure for the passenger journey.