Pedestrian Overpass

Synonyms / Other Terms Used

Overpass, Cross Bridge

Category

General Information, General Access, Public Facilities

Message / Function

To show the location of a pedestrian overpass

	Source	Description
	ISO 7001	Side view of a climbing figure, part of a pedestrian overpass or footbridge
	CNIS	Side view of a climbing figure, part of a pedestrian overpass
	STVO D	Side view of human figure on stair profile walking upwards
	Baden-Baden	Side view of human figure on stair profile walking upwards
	STP BT 2017	Side view of human figure on stair profile walking upwards
	Tern	Side view of human figure on stair profile walking downwards
	Llisole	Side view of human figure on overpass with railing
	Frankfurt 1978	Side view of human figure on overpass with railing, car below
	Erco	Side view of human figure on overpass with railing, car below
	silhouetteAC	Side view of pedestrian overpass with stairs and railing, all in outline
	Thakur	Perspective view of pedestrian overpass
	RSS Wiki	Side view of human figure walking, sectional view of bridge, text 'Overpass' and arrow below

Note: Some of the examples shown above were mirrored horizontally to contrast differences.

Discussion

The collection above is quite limited: internet search for pictograms related to Pedestrian Overpass yields also variants concerning Footbridge and Pedestrian Crossing. This indicates that there might be no clear differentiation between Pedestrian Overpass and Footbridge. There also is no single stereotype to show the location of a pedestrian overpass, but the majority of pictograms explicitly designed for this message display the side view of a human figure walking on a stair profile.

In our research we discovered that there is only very limited test data available for the referent Pedestrian Overpass, as just one pictogram variant has been tested:

A study about symbols for wayfinding in transit hubs in China including a Comprehension Test (An & Chan, 2017) reports about 67 % correct answers among Chinese respondents for the pictogram of the Chinese standard GB/T 10001.1-2012, Public Information Graphical Symbols, labeled CNIS in the table above. So this pictogram seems to convey its message just well enough to pass ISO minimum requirements for standardization.

Recommendations

We suggest to develop additional pictogram variants without stairs, that may also be used for the referent Footbridge, and then identify the necessity of differentiation between the two referents by conducting a Comprehension Test including sufficient context information. Qualitative analysis of responses from this test should provide this information. The already standardized public information symbol PI PF 080 from ISO 7001 should also be included in this research, to offer comprehensibility data for this variant also.

Tests of pictograms of referent Pedestrian Overpass

An, D. & Chan, E.H.W. (2017): Investigating the Comprehension of Public Symbols for Wayfinding in Transit Hubs in China. In: Rau, PL. (eds) Cross-Cultural Design. CCD 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10281. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57931-3_24