Cameron Adamez was outfitted with Tobii Pro eye-tracker glasses on a recent Friday afternoon and dispatched to the caverns beneath City Hall Station on a mission from SEPTA to find out just how difficult it is to get around its rail transit system.

Adamez was a volunteer test subject in an experiment designed and conducted by Megan Ryerson, the UPS chair of transportation at the University of Pennsylvania, to generate data for SEPTA planners overhauling the system’s way-finding: the maps, signs, and branding that clue riders where to go for what line.

“I think of it as epidemiology for navigation,” said Ryerson, an associate professor of both city and regional planning and electrical and systems engineering at Penn.

“We wanted to determine whether people are understanding the way-finding signage, how they are navigating the space from a human perspective,” she said.
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