Comment

Push for a calmer commute

By Earle Gale (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-01-12 09:19

With construction set to end this year on five new subway lines in the capital and work about to begin on four more, Beijing is hurtling toward a world-leading underground system more quickly than a bullet train on a bobsleigh run.

Liu Yinchun, deputy director of the Beijing municipal commission of development and reform, told METRO last week that the five lines that will open this year will add more than 300 km to the city's already impressive underground rail network.

And crews will continue to work on four additional lines that will open in the following years.

All of the new routes are eagerly awaited. Already, some 4.8 million people ride the rails each day and that number is likely to shunt up significantly when the new lines reach suburbs and neglected corners of the city where people have relied on buses, cars and taxis up until now.

At just 2 yuan a trip, the subway here has got to be one of the cheapest networks on the planet - and therefore one of the most popular.

There can be little doubt that the government's 10.3 billion yuan investment in public transit last year was money well spent and the effort will go a long way toward driving polluting cars off the roads and helping China meet its target of reducing CO2 emissions intensity by 40 to 45 percent by 2020 from the 2005 level.

But along with the evolution of the subway system, I would really like to see a corresponding evolution in the behavior of subway riders.

Wouldn't it be lovely if 2010 was also the year in which passengers stopped acting like school children fighting their way to the front of the lunchroom lineup?

Would it not be great if this was the year people brightened the underground system with the same good manners and politeness that is so common among Beijingers above ground?

If nothing else, wouldn't it be fantastic if this was the year people finally realized that it's a whole lot easier to get on a subway train if you let people get off it first to make room for you? if people accepted that doorways get jammed when large numbers of people try to go through them in both directions at the same time?

I don't know much about the new subway lines and the trains that will run on them - maybe they will be styled after the Airport Express. Its trains have doors that open on one side to let people get off before doors open along the other side to let people get on.

But if the new trains are the same as the old ones, we are about to get a whole new heap of fresh hotspots where little old ladies will get trampled underfoot in the rush for a seat and where people without the physique of a wrestler will find it hard to get off a train during rush hour in the face of so many people pushing to get on.

Maybe my moaning will be moot after the new lines open. I'm clinging to the hope that the extra routes and trains will spread riders out across the network and mean trains everywhere will be less crowded. If the mass of people on platforms and in carriages is smaller, people will feel less inclined to push and shove. I'm sure no one enjoys it and I bet we all want to stop.

With a little luck, this expansion will give us the excuse we all need to extend the reach of Beijingers' famed courtesy and good manners into the dark recesses of the underground system.