The free Metro Express commuter paper has a big front-page spread today on the People's Square metro interchange make-over. The headline announces that "People's Square Three Line Interchange Hall To Open By Year's End", which is old news to those who have been following the progress of the new metro Line 8. Instead, the reason for the story being published today is that the Shanghai Rail Transport Construction Headquarters just released a bunch of numbers on the new station, as well as a map of the planned station layout. Among the numbers:

• 3 subway lines (Lines 1, 2 and 8)
• over 8000 square meters (bigger than a standard soccer field)
• 2 underground levels
• able to handle 76,400 passengers per hour compared to the current 30,000 and the predicted 45,000
• average transit distance of 70 meters (half the current average)
• 1 control room to govern the entire station (currently, Line 1 and Line 2 have separate control rooms)
• 5 doors from Line 1 to the transfer hall
• 10 doors from Line 2 to the transfer hall
• a 17-meter wide Grand-Gateway-style connecting stairway to the Line 8 platform, including 6 (six!) adjacent escalators, 3 in each direction.

The transfer hall has a big open space facing the sky, and may cause a sense of deja vu when the "underground city and garden" metro station servicing the World Expo grounds is opened to the public.

Frequent commuters are looking forward to the opening of the transfer hall as transfers between Line 1 and 2 are becoming increasingly crowded. A reporter from the Shanghai Morning Post noted in a recent article that more and more passengers are breaking the rules regarding which route to use when transferring at People's Square (ie 1→2 use the long passage, 2→1 use the short passage with the escalators). The rules were instituted a few years ago as foot traffic increased so as to avoid passenger congestion. If you've been through there, though, you know that 80% of the time simply walking past the posted station attendant in the wrong direction will get you nothing more than a glance.

Also, at the bottom of the Metro Express front page are two smaller articles also on public transportation topics. The first says that the Shanghai Metro company and the company that runs the LCD screens on the train cars are looking to add newscasts and weather reports to the current programming. The other article says that public transportation discounts for students and seniors will probably be in form of RMB 1 off ticket prices for A/C buses and the metro. According to the Transportation Authority, the software upgrades necessary to institute the discount were installed when the software for the bus transfer discount program was installed earlier this year.

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