Publicity is a key element to increasing the ridership of any transit agency. A large part of it is making sure customers know how to get where they need to go. Can the average user figure this out in a reasonable amount of time? Is the information displayed in an organized, succinct and accurate fashion?
Showing customers where they can get to is difficult in many ways. Part of this is knowing how much information they need. If there is too little, the customer can't get around without having to consult other help. However, if there is too much, the customer is overloaded with massive quantities of useless details about the system, taking forever to derive what they need to know.
The standard way of depicting information about a transportation system is by adding labels onto a map or diagram, a representation well suited to helping a customer get from point A to point B. Diagrams tend to increase the comprehensibility of the labels and the space available for them by sacrificing details in geography, while maps tend to do the opposite.
This type of publicity is best done when the information given to the user is situationally based. A rider downtown or in a central area would require different information than one leaving their house in a more residential area.
Typically, the information that a customer needs when arriving at a stop is what their destination should be and how they can get there. In an area with fewer options, less is more. Instead of showing a system map, the station would display a basic map of the destinations of the route they are on. The map could also show transfer points located on that route. If possible, adding the destinations attainable from these transfer points would also help, as long as the information remains clear and the map uncluttered.
In central locations, because of the greater quantity of transit options, the data would only be about the destinations of routes themselves and not transfer points along them. To clarify the information given in these situations, a diagram would be used to allow the space necessary for the extra labels. It would simplify the geography, keeping it mostly accurate, which would improve its readability.
This applies to Metro as it does to any transit agency. While Metro offers large system maps in central areas, it takes pretty long to find where you are on the map in the first place, and reading the rest of the map is also an undertaking. Downtown Seattle is a massive issue, as it is practically impossible to find a particular route in the cluster of Third Avenue buses.
With such a large quantity of buses downtown, it might be helpful to organize different routes by their destination. This is exemplified in the signage of the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel, and could help with surface routes too. For example, a Third Avenue bus stop might have one simplified map for each large, general area of Seattle that the stop serves rather than one map for the entire Metro system.