Transport tips: free maps and magnetic strips

Two bits of transportation news from random sources:

The Xinmin Evening Post reports that the Shanghai Pudong Airport Authority and the Shanghai Mapping Institute will be making free maps of the city available in special racks at the Pudong Airport starting this week, with plans to expand to Hongqiao Airport and the Shanghai Railway Station. The map is the standard Chinese map of Shanghai that you can buy for RMB 6 at bookstores throughout the city, but in bilingual Chinese-English. Japanese and Korean versions are forthcoming. Is this a secret strike at the pirated map vendors operating on the city's subways who undercut the official map at only RMB 3? Pure speculation, but in a country with crocodile mouth urinals you never know...

Also, "city tips and weather forecast" SMS that Shanghaiist's wife gets every day alerted us that the Shanghai Railway Station and South Railway Stations have begun to sell tickets with magnetic strips in order to speed up the train check-in process. This reasoning doesn't sound entirely truthful; just last week our mother-in-law went back home from by train and there was no check-in process at all, presumably since the process of manually checking everyone's ticket is really just too burdensome and slow for the station staff to go through. More likely this is a move to beefen up security in the boarding process.

This post was cross-posted at the Shanghai Public Transportation weblog.