Beijing’s shiny subway
Underneath China’s capital mega-city, Beijing boasts one of the world’s most extensive subway systems. The subway mirrors Beijing’s rapid development over the past 40 years.
I first rode Beijing’s subway in 1979, when the system was just eight years old. This was the only one subway line in China at that time — Line 1, or the Red Line, ran underneath Beijing’s main east-west thoroughfare for about 25 km.
Line 2, or the Blue Line, opened in the early 1980s, forming a rectangular loop beneath the footprint of Beijing’s ancient city walls, which had long since been replaced by the first of many “ring roads” around the city.
Lines 1 and 2 made up the entire subway system until the early 2000s, when infrastructure improvements swung into high gear in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. By 2009, Beijing had been transformed by new roads, buildings, and subway lines in the wake of the Olympics. I lived in the city then, and my local stop was on the Blue Line. I could avoid the already infamous traffic jams by travelling underground, with 13 lines providing easy access to most places I needed to go. Line 1 alone now stretched to the suburbs in the east and west and boasted 34 stations, double the number in 1979.
I still try to ride the subway whenever I visit Beijing. While I knew that the system had continued to expand since 2010, I didn’t comprehend the scope until I snagged a hard-to-get Beijing Rail Transit Lines map this spring — and was astounded to realize that the tracks had doubled again in length in less than a decade.
Beijing now boasts the world’s busiest subway system, with a mind-boggling 10.5 million riders a day. New York City has about 4.3 million average daily riders, while Washington DC, with 91 stations, has about 800,000 daily riders. At rush hours the crush of riders travelling underneath Beijing is worth avoiding — but during less busy times of day, I find the subway generally clean, safe, and easy to navigate.
The subway will take you to — or close to — most places you want to go in this huge city. Red and Blue Lines 1 and 2 are little changed, but the web around them has grown in all directions in the past 10 years. In 2009, for instance, Line 10 formed an “L” shape with 22 stops. Now it forms a second complete rectangle encompassing the Line 2 footprint within it, running more or less underneath the city’s Third Ring Road (out of the seven highways that now form concentric circles around Beijing). Line 10 has 42 stops—and is just one of 22 lines with a system total of 391 stations and 395 miles of track. Somehow, transit bureaucrats have come up with 22 hues to distinguish each line on the subway system by a different color on the map.
The Beijing subway signage is also exceptionally good — always in both Chinese and English, with symbols that are easy to understand. Place names appear in both Chinese characters and in English romanization. Platforms are well marked, making it easy to determine which track you want. On the trains, a pleasantly canned woman’s voice announces every stop, lists the transfer lines, and somewhat needlessly reminds riders to “Please prepare to get off the train” — always in both Chinese and English. Every station has multiple entrances and exits, most with helpful maps showing the neighborhood and key landmarks at each exit.
If you don’t speak Chinese, get help to purchase your initial subway card. The ticket machines are not intuitive — although many larger stations have ticket offices with helpful agents, or at least a guard on duty willing to help. Things are also not simple for less mobile travelers. Many stations are entered only via a long staircase—although elevators supposedly exist in newer stations. An occasional escalator may appear, but chances are it’s not going in the direction you need. To transfer from one line to another, the walking distances can be very long.
Security is…secure. There is an x-ray machine and a security checkpoint at virtually every entrance to every station. That means the system has several thousand scanning machines, with an average of three people manning each one. Even at rush hour, these bag checkers manage to go through the motions of checking every bag for millions of passengers a day.
This is an impressive subway system, albeit with room to improve. Much of it has been built in the last decade, and it is state-of-the art. Given Beijing’s jammed roads, the subway will usually be faster than the alternative. Like China, its pace of growth is impressive, it is crowded and, as long as you follow the rules, it is generally safe and very secure.
Madelyn Global 