Before (photoshopped to show old display):
Electronic signs in BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) received a quiet upgrade earlier this month. The new display format significantly increases the "data-to-ink" ratio of the signs. The data-to-ink ratio is a term coined by Edward Tufte which describes how much ink (or pixels) is used to represent each data point in a chart. The greater the data/ink ratio the less ink (or screen real estate) is spent conveying each data point and the more information can be shown on each page.
As you can see, the new display shows estimated arrival times of the next 2 trains in roughly the same space as the old display showed a single train.That is a 2X improvement of the data-to-ink ratio, way to go BART! This seems to be the first major change since the arrival time estimations went live in 1999.
