alt Hacker NewsWow, the props to the author for digging deep!
> Looking inside of the display, I found labels identifying the make and model. The signs were designed and manufactured by Trans-Lite, Inc., a company based in Milford, Connecticut that specialised in transport signage from 1959 until its acquisition by the Nordic firm Teknoware in 2012. After lots of amateur detective work, and with the help from an anonymous Reddit user in a Connecticut community group, I was connected with Gary Wallberg, Senior Engineer at Trans-Lite and the person responsible for the design of these very signs back in 1999.
Few years back, we had a work thread about this exact Muni Metro font and the designers brought up segmented types. We never got as far as the author in finding the source, but did bring up other systems with similar typefaces.
NYC has their own called R142A: https://www.nyctransitforums.com/topic/55346-r142a-mosaic-lc...
And here's one inspired by Spain's transit system: https://aresluna.org/segmented-type/
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New Jersey Transit trains use something similar to this, but with many more segments
Interesting! Since Ansaldo Breda is an Italian company, I would have thought that the signs were European as well. Similar LCD "mosaic" displays were pretty widespread over here until a few years ago (e.g. in some platform signs on the Munich U-Bahn: https://www.u-bahn-muenchen.de/betrieb/zugzielanzeiger/, scroll to "LCD-Digitalanzeiger'), but they have all been replaced with standard TFT flat screens (or in the case of line displays on vehicles, LED based dot matrix displays) since...
The segmented type site that lets you see a bunch of different options reminded me of Posy's YouTube video where he investigates a bunch of weird options for these: https://youtu.be/RTB5XhjbgZA?si=y7npP6KfXlOGNoHZ
R142A is simply the name of a type of subway car. The NYCT identifies the car by contract number which is increasing (bigger number means more recent). The latest is R211 in three variants (R211T, R211S, R211A).