China Segment

Just before New Years’, Shanghai opened up 3 new subway lines (#6, 8 and half of line 9), finished line 4 (finally), and added an extension on to line 1.

There are now millions of people taking the subways everyday in this massive metropolis. This isn’t always a good thing.

Line 1, already crowded non-stop, regardless of the time of day, adds yet more people by extending ever-more into the northern suburbs. Yuck. Avoid it.

Thankfully, the line 4 circle is finally completed. It’s about 2 years late, owing to a collapse of a section and resulting flooding in 2005 that rather quickly disappeared from the news. I never found out if any of the workers died. Line 4 has always suffered from a lack of trains, so that on its partial opening from late 2005 one had to wait about 20 minutes between trains. The city has ’solved’ this problem… sort of. Just missing a train the other day left me waiting 10 minutes. Fudge.

Line 6 has all kinds of talk about it: the cars are too short, there are only 4 cars on a train sometimes (apparently fixed at 6 cars now - still far too few). Oh Pudong, sucks to be you. People who tried taking the buses above ground along the route found that many of them had been canceled due to the new subway line. Nice anticipation, but perhaps a bit soon.

Line 9, which will someday be my favorite as I live near Zhaojiabang Road (肇嘉浜路), comes from the satellite city of Songjiang (松江) - home of many campuses - but only now reaches the still-netherlands of Guilin Road (桂林路). Who besides wealthy expats lives around Guilin Road? They all have drivers. Anyway, this first stage of line 9 was supposed to link up with line 3 at Yishan Road (宜山路), so that in theory daily commuters and university students coming home to see mommy and daddy on the weekends could get on line 3 and then probably change to line 1 or line 2 to actually get somewhere.  Since it doesn’t link up with line 3 yet, the city has to provide buses to shuttle people from Guilin Road to Yishan Road.  The line will remain relatively useless for most people until its final completion, when it’ll skirt all the way along the southern edge of downtown and then cross over to Century Avenue in Pudong.

I’ve ridden the subways recently. It’s not pretty.

Evermore people, evermore crowding. Even my old favorite line 2, always a standby for non-crowding and relative civility, is now packed. No space for breathing. I mean really, even in prisons inmates are supposed to get a few cubic meters of air each.

And the changes. There are a couple places where changing is simple and even a spot where you can just walk across a hall to the next line (Century Avenue, line 2-6, oh so reminding me of fast, cool, efficient Hong Kong MTR). But the ‘improvements’ at People’s Square? Get outta here. Although at first glance it looks like a more comfortable space - open like a train station, natural light coming in - it is, in reality, large masses of human beings hurtling towards each other like I’ve never seen before. At least with the old (ridiculous) walkways, each group of people changing between lines 1 and 2 had to use their own route. Thus, there was no trying to go against the flow. Now, with another line involved (8) and all its people gettin’ into it as well, the designers decided to make one wide-open pitch in which 3 lines of commuters end up in a big scrum (albeit a scrum with natural light). Best you can do is look for a rather large, fast moving dude and get in behind him. (Think blocking fullback.)

I’ll take the bus with its fresh air instead.

Feds

Bookmark It