I hate to do laundry. I’ve always hated to do laundry. In fact, when I was in college, I once made it a record six weeks without venturing to that dreaded room in my dorm basement. My secret? Underwear, lots of underwear. After all, who really cares how many times you rotate sweatpants and jeans when you’re 18 and trudging around the campus anti-world? Underwear is a different story, though. One-and-done is my motto, so the key is to have A LOT of it.

My aversion to the washing machine took on a new dimension in those college years. When I ran dangerously low on unmentionables, I bought a couple of pairs at a boutique near campus. You can imagine how that price tag impacted my poor-student budget, so I knew I had to find a more sustainable approach.

Laundry time? Nope. I needed Target.

The problem was that with campus nestled in a residential area and the mall in the next town over–and me having no car–I needed transportation. None of my friends had cars either, so desperation led me to the city bus.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with the bus, and as I have cruised through adulthood exploring different cities around the world, I think public transportation is one of the greatest inventions ever. But as an eighteen-year-old from the Midwest, I had no idea how to use it. It intimidated me.

In fact, buses still intimidate me. Trains are pretty simple to figure out; there’s always a map nearby to offer the big picture, and whole system is generally well-mapped visually. It’s easy to see how many stops, how many changes, where to switch, etc.

Not so with buses.

Without a station structure to house maps and posters–and with less oversight to deter vandalism–bus huts have neither the space nor the maintenance routine to provide much information. In fact, there’s often just a sign marking the location of the stop sitting atop an abbreviated schedule that looks something like this–if you’re lucky:

So say I know I’m standing at Tunnel & Thayer. I can see all the times the bus will arrive to whisk me away. I can even intuit to which stops it will take me, but what then? How do I know where to transfer? What’s available to transfer TO at those stops? Where are they in relation to anything? And how much does this even cost? Is bus riding some elite club for people who grew up in the city, a conspiracy to make the rest of us feel like country cousins?

Today I’d pull up the Transit Authority’s website on my phone and try to figure it out, but in 1987, there was no internet, let alone smartphones. Heck, car-mounted cell phones were just starting to come out, and they were super expensive. But, I digress.

My point is that this is a communications disaster. It’s not intuitive and there’s no real way to get information when you need it. Good communications principles don’t just apply to marketing efforts, meetings, and manners. They should be ubiquitous. They apply to everything, even bus schedules.

When you’re trying to give people information, remember this:

• Don’t leave out important information.
• Make it easy.
• Use visuals when possible.
• Spread the word.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll just do my laundry more often.