Do the signs actually work?
An observation study of passenger behaviour in the Copenhagen metro
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A pandemic-era 'Rejs med omtanke' information board beside the escalators in a Copenhagen metro station, showing mask, hygiene and distance icons
- Context
- PI-Projekt 1, DTU
- Year
- 2021
- Role
- Observation, interviews and analysis
- Team size
- 5
- Tools
- Participant observation · Semi-structured interviews · Survey design · KJ method · Affinity analysis
- Contribution
- Team of 5, participant observation, interviews and survey analysis
An observation and interview study of whether the signs, floor markings and announcements put into the Copenhagen metro during the pandemic actually changed how passengers behaved. Built on participant observation across several stations, three interviews and a survey with 83 responses.
The question
After March 2020 a large number of behaviour-regulating measures were put into the metro, including directional arrows on the floor, distance requirements on the escalators, and signs and announcements reminding passengers of the rules. Here the interesting question is not whether the measures existed and instead whether they worked, since 290 million passengers took the train and metro in 2019 and the metro is one of the places where the most people pass through in the shortest time. This meant the study asked what influence the signs, sounds and stickers actually had on passenger behaviour.
How we studied it
Each of us carried out between one and two hours of participant observation, using a shared observation guide in order to keep the data comparable, and we used both passive participation, standing still and observing people passing, and complete participation, taking the metro ourselves in order to understand what was going on in our own heads while navigating. Furthermore we ran three semi-structured interviews, including one with a metro steward who has daily contact with passenger behaviour at all hours, and a survey with 83 responses. The analysis was done with inspiration from the KJ method, where we set up five codes covering face masks, distance, one-way flow, sound and signage, and then compared the strongest statements across the datasets.
What we found
The signs and the loudspeaker announcements largely did not work. Across observations at Christianshavn and Kongens Nytorv, 59% of the 49 people who passed did not notice the distance sign next to the escalator at all, while 75% of the 43 observed did not keep the required distance, which means that even most of those who did see the sign ignored it. In the survey only 26.5% noticed the loudspeaker guidance, and the steward described the announcements as running so often that passengers stop registering them. This is due to people in the metro being in a hurry, and the space itself encouraging them to move quickly without engaging with what is around them. However the floor arrows worked. 71% of survey respondents said the directional arrows were what they noticed most, against 18.8% for the escalator distance sign, and in one observation 132 people walked with the one-way flow against 17 who walked against it. The explanation seems to be that an arrow requires very little connotative work in order to be understood, since it is a simple symbol recognised at a distance, while a sign requires someone in a hurry to stop and read. The third finding was that passengers are governed by each other more than by any of it. We observed a man walking against the one-way flow for a long stretch without ever looking down at the arrows, and changing direction only when a group of people came towards him, and a woman realising she was going the wrong way purely because other passengers were coming up the stairs. Furthermore 24.4% of survey respondents said it was other people who reminded them of the one-way system.
What I would do differently
All the data was collected on a single day, which means the result is closer to a snapshot than to a study of behaviour over time. Furthermore whether someone noticed a sign rested on our own subjective judgement, and we were working with social psychology, which sits some way from what we had been taught, so we would have done well to interview someone with expertise in the field before interpreting our own data. The survey also carried questions written before the observations had told us what mattered.