<<Many years ago, I was much impressed by the London underground when I became separated from my tour group, and made it back to the hostel all on my own, without asking anyone, or ever once feeling uncertain longer than it took to read a sign>>
It's certainly well signed and the maps are clear. When I visited Moscow in 1989, their Metro system had borrowed the idea of giving each line its own colour. Unfortunately, unlike the tube in London, where the colours are used consistently on all signage to help you see which line you're on or heading towards, in Moscow they only used the colours on the maps. So to follow the signs to the platform for the right line, you had to be able to read the name of the line in Russian. Worse still, the name of the station was shown just once on each platform, so as the train pulled into the station, you had just one chance the read the name to find out whether this was your stop. This was bad enough if you could read Russian, as I could, but it was a nightmare if you couldn't - and most of my tour group couldn't. They were reduced to using pattern recognition - trying to remember the "shape" of the most striking cyrillic letters in the name of the station they wanted to get off at. Several of them just counted the number of stops they passed through and hope they'd get out at the right one. The crowning illogicality was that each station had a different name for each line that it was on. That would be like arriving at Charing Cross station on the Northern Line and then walking down a corridor to the Bakerloo line platform and finding yourself on a platform labelled Trafalgar Square. User-friendliness was clearly not high on the Soviet Union's list of prioities! Regards, Annette in London, where at least you can find the right tube train, even if it's likely to come off the rails... To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
