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Comment by scoopertrooper | Hacker News Reader

Creating a distinctive symbol to represent an entity to the general public is a made up problem?

What's the alternative? Have a paragraph of text on every sign? Perhaps: "This cavity provides access to a subterranean network of locomotives that provide a means to traverse the city"

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Trying to stylise the letter M to be distinctive is pretty circuitous - just use an icon of a train! You remove the problem almost entirely, and get a symbol which is easily recognisable even to people who don’t speak the local language.

In Sydney, in the last 10 years our icons have been replaced by stylised letters. T stands for train (not Taxi or Tram), except when it doesn’t and M stands for Metro (which everyone still just calls the train), L stands for light rail (which everyone calls Trams)… it was so much more clear when there were just icons.

I'm curious to know if and how you would then distinguish between a metro and the national railway, or other types of railway. I suppose one could argue they should all have the same symbol, but I feel that distinction can be helpful to people using the services.

Maybe not the symbol, but the article artificially constraining itself to 'M' seems a bit suspect to me. In my country the symbol for the metro isn't even M [1]

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Singapor...

>What's the alternative?

Use the ISO 7001 symbols. https://iss.isolutions.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:pub:PUB400006:en

Personally I think they're ugly. Not always more ugly than a given 'M' though.

That page appears to show only one icon for trains, one for trams, and one for subways. No variation or alternative options.

I can see incorporating something like that into the signage around the facilities, or even in the logo, but the entire point of a logo is that it is relatively unique and distinctive and separate from all other things that might be like that — which is the exact opposite of this kind of standardized international icon.

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