Wayfinding & Pedheads
If you've spent any time walking around downtown, you've likely seen the signs posted on walk signals directing you to various places around the city. Those are called ped heads, and they're an iQuilt initiative. Here are five ped head facts.
There are signs at 73 intersections.
In 2012, signs were installed at 45 downtown intersections. We expanded the 2017 installation to include areas around Coltsville and Trinity College, including signs on Hudson Street, Huyshope Avenue, Park Street, Retreat Avenue, Washington Street, and Wethersfield Avenue.
Updating our wayfinding system took 36 months. Why?
First, we surveyed the signs installed in 2012 and learned that a little over a third of them had to be replaced. This allowed us to update the signs with destinations that didn't exist then: Dunkin' Donuts Park, UConn Hartford, Dillon Stadium, and Coltsville National Historical Park. After that, we had to secure funding, identify new locations, determine what to put on all the signs, edit, edit, edit, revise, edit, print, and install.
We installed 450 signs.
Each sign lists five destinations and the number of minutes you'll need to walk to them. That means we had to make roughly 2,250 decisions about which destinations went where. Seventy-six destinations are listed, including the Regional Market, Webster Theater, the Mark Twain House, Keney Clocktower, City Hall, the Riverfront, Billings Forge, Hartford Hospital, Union Station and Bushnell Park.
The system coverage area is 19.4 miles of sidewalk.
If you measured the length of where our signs are and where they point to, it adds up to 19.4 miles. That's far enough to go from Connecticut's Old State House to Heublein Tower and then over to the University of Hartford, or the length of the CTfastrak loop from New Britain to the downtown Hartford station and back.
We didn't do it all by ourselves.
Our partners in this project are the City of Hartford, The National Park Service, and SignPro. NPS was instrumental in helping us secure funding through the Federal Lands Access Program, and SignPro - a Connecticut company - printed and installed all 450 signs.
We've got a little more work to do to finish the project, but we're pretty proud of what we've accomplished so far.
Press Release: Hartford Updates, Expands Pedestrian Wayfinding System