Small improvements add up.

Let’s start by simply improving the typography of the sign to be more legible at a distance, and to better align with the MTA signage guidelines:

From here, we can make a clear functional improvement by using the horizontal space to show the next train on the track:

The black and white sections are potentially confusing here, it turns out. Nearly everyone I showed this design to first read the black section as being the time of the next train, though they quickly understood the actual meaning upon another second’s look. Not good enough. I decided to turn the cells into overlapping cards, giving a slight shadow and affordance to them to reinforce the idea that these trains are behind each other on the track.

Combined with the basic knowledge of how trains operate, reading the times left to right, and the visual cue of having one card “behind” another, slightly de-emphasized, everyone grasped this design much more easily.

However, as I found earlier, there is a sweet spot of knowing the next three trains to come: in regular service, three is the upper limit of the number of train types that may arrive on one track. By stacking the repetitive “min” indicator under the numbers, I made more room for more trains and actually increased the size of the text, making it easier to see at a distance.

It’s still possible that your train wouldn’t be listed (for example, if there were two C trains and an A train first in line, the D would be fourth and not displayed). However, in this case you likely have all the information you need to make a decision anyway — your train will not be here very soon.

For one-track platforms, the single row affords more white-space and larger type, just making the information design better.