Beijing subway to increase train frequencies, but still lags behind Hong Kong MTR
An ongoing upgrade to the signal system of a Beijing subway line may delight the city's harried commuters by further increasing train frequencies; however, it still falls short of the impressive record held by the Hong Kong MTR, which dispatches a train every 1.9 minutes during peak hours.
The Beijing Subway Company is currently upgrading the 20-year-old signal system of its oldest route, Line 1, which would make it one of the busiest subway systems in the world, local newspapers said on Thursday.
“By the time [the upgrade] completes, it will help reduce the interval between trains during rush hours by another 5 seconds, to 2 minutes,” an official at the company told the South China Morning post on Thursday.
Several local papers, including and , have said this would put Line 1 among the busiest underground transportation systems in the world.
However, even after the upgrade, the Line 1 still lags slightly behind its Hong Kong counterpart, MTR's Island Line in terms of train frequencies.
The subway system in the Chinese capital, now totalling 527 kilometres in rail length, is the world's busiest by annual ridership, transporting an average of 9.3 million passengers per day in 2014.
The 31km-long Line 1, the city’s oldest line that runs east-west through Beijing's downtown, currently has a daily capacity of over 1.5 million passengers. It gets so crowded during morning and evening rush hours that stations hire security guards to physically push passengers into already jam-packed cars so doors could close. Like Hong Kong's MTR, it is not uncommon for less sturdy passengers to wait five or six trains on the platform before they could board one.
Beijing has said it plans to double the total track length of its subway system to 1,000 kilometres by 2020. Shanghai currently holds the world title of the largest subway system by length of passenger route, at 567 kilometres.
