Martinez pilots the Bay Area's new standard bus stop signs

Martinez is the first city in Contra Costa County to get the Bay Area's new standardized bus stop signs, Tri Delta Transit announced Friday.

Five stops are due to change in the next month or two: Alhambra and Walnut, eastbound and westbound; Alhambra and C Street, eastbound and westbound; and Escobar and Alhambra. All five are on or beside Alhambra Avenue, the spine of downtown.

The new signs are meant to be read quickly at stops served by more than one route or more than one operator. In Martinez they will include how to connect to Tri Delta Transit's 200X and how to reach the agency by phone, the agency said.

The design behind them is regional. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission has been building a single set of standards for directional signs, maps, diagrams and the basic instructions for paying a fare and riding, so that a rider sees the same design language on any of the region's operators. MTC says the standards were developed with all two dozen Bay Area transit agencies, along with riders, cities and counties across the nine-county region.

Transit agency leaders approved the designs in February and selected vendors in June. MTC is also running pilots at nine larger hubs through 2026 and 2027, including El Cerrito del Norte, Dublin/Pleasanton, Millbrae, Palo Alto, Larkspur, Vallejo, Suisun-Fairfield, Santa Rosa and Powell Street in San Francisco. Once that testing is done in 2027, the commission plans to install the new materials at thousands of stations and stops around the Bay Area.

No exact installation date has been announced for the Martinez stops, and no cost figure has been published for the pilot.