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When I visited Shanghai, I noticed that late at night when there are not many passengers, they will kick everybody off the train at a random stop. They do this
by umanwizard 7y ago
When I visited Shanghai, I noticed that late at night when there are not many passengers, they will kick everybody off the train at a random stop. They do this with a few trains in a row until there are enough people waiting in the station to fill up a train to some acceptable level.
I assume that the point of consolidating everybody into one train like this is so they can avoid wasting power decelerating/accelerating on a bunch of trains. I.e. just run all the empty ones to the terminus without stopping.
It was a bit annoying whenever it happened to us, but I think this is a better system than getting rid of heavily used local stops entirely.
Edit: As a reply explains, it's possible my description is slightly inaccurate.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoWould this really save much efficiency versus the much less disruptive option of taking the trains out of commission (for the evening/morning/etc) when they get to the end of their route?
- umanwizard 7y agoI'm really not an expert on subways, so I don't know. But I can only assume that the people who run the Shanghai metro know what they're doing.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoSorry, shouldn't have framed that as a question directed at you specifically. :)
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoSame thing happens in Beijing. Where they kick you off happens to be a subway depot where the train will sleep for the night (which isn't always at the terminus, e.g. if it is a loop line or at a remote junction); or it will simply express to the terminus after dumping all of its passengers. Usually, it's just the train's "time" to be off duty, they aren't actually looking at passenger densities or anything like that.
- umanwizard 7y agoThanks for the clarification. Good chance that this is what's going on in Shanghai as well. I don't speak Chinese at all so I was pretty clueless.
- vorg 7y ago> They do this with a few trains in a row until there are enough people waiting in the station to fill up a train to some acceptable level The "acceptable level" probably doesn't account for everyone getting a seat on the continuation train. This used to happen with buses in Wuhan 10 years ago. If two buses on the same route met up and each had only seated passengers, one would send its passengers to the other bus to stand for the rest of the journey. This was annoying because I would travel places at off-peak times just so I could get a seat. And of course, because this happens occasionally, it affects everyone using the Shanghai Metro because they all need to build in contingency time when planning a trip to get somewhere by a certain time for an appointment.