China: Transportation options

When you are in the large cities of China, you have a lot of options for transportation including hailing taxis, Grab, and trains.

Taxis

The taxi situation is interesting as there are official taxis and unofficial taxis. The official taxis are what you’ll find that lined up at a taxi queue like anywhere else in the world. On the other hand, the unofficial taxis are people who are generally yelling at you do you want a taxi. Or, as happened to me at the airport, trying to grab your stuff and take you away to their taxi while you’re trying to get into an official taxi by saying they know where you need to go. The pricing for taxi rides is very cheap so the only reason I generally wouldn’t use them is that if there’s a lot of traffic it would take a lot longer than the subway.

Ride Sharing

Like Uber and Lyft in America, there is Grab in most of Asia.  Ride-hailing services like this can be very useful for getting around town too.
My favorite form of transportation was the trains though.  They are very efficient and cost-effective.

Subways – local trains

The subways here are amazing. First of all they’ve got many lines — the map for Beijing does kind of look like a spaghetti bowl, but you can get pretty much anywhere with possibly two transfers, and most places with none or one. I think it would be rare that you’d need 3 transfers. The only negative is that they didn’t seem to have a whole lot of escalators or elevators so disabled people would have a hard time, as there were a lot of stairs and walking.

Station signage

The signage in the stations is very good assuming you speak either Chinese or English. I didn’t see anything other than those two languages. Of course, there’s just a little bit of English as it’s mostly Chinese, but it was enough. Additionally, every station has labeled lettered exits for different attractions. You can pick which exit you want to go out based on where you want to be. There are maps throughout the station showing where each exit ends up so that you can figure out which of those letters you want to follow.

Additionally, there are lots of signs for going to different train lines. When you get to the trains themselves there are signs up with the remaining train stops for each direction of travel. Additionally, the next station is marked on the posts nearest the train. So whether you know where the end-point of your line is or you know where you at the next stop is you can figure out which train you need to board.

Riding the trains

The trains themselves are basically one long train. The train is segmented but it’s all one big open train with seating on the outside edge. There are police guards on elevated platforms watching everything. It’s all very orderly. There are marks on the ground where the train will stop because the train is blocked off so no one can fall in. When the train arrives the doors open and the middle section of the path is for people to leave the train and then the two sides which basically lineup inline get onto the train. It’s all pretty orderly.

The trains can be very crowded at rush hour. You basically just get squished in but they’ve arranged that there are pulls and handles that most people can reach but even if you can’t the trains run really smoothly so you see a lot of people who aren’t even trying to hang on to anything.
In addition to the security people on the Platforms, there are a couple of security people on each train too. I saw them do things a couple of times but mostly they just seem to ride the trains all day long.

In-train signage

The trains have lit panels that show which stations have been passed, which station you’re currently going to, and which stations are coming. Additionally, the signage indicates which side the doors will open on so pretty much you can get the status anywhere on the train.

The one negative thing that stood out to me about the train system here is that as far as I can tell there are no printed versions available at all. I would have had a much harder time navigating with the unusual words (to me) if I hadn’t printed a map while at home.

This lack of paper is similar to my experience at attractions. None of the locations I went to had a brochure. At most have a map on the back of your ticket. One exception to that was the Forbidden City where you don’t even get a ticket — they just use your passport number which you have to show at the entrance to each different portion as your ticket so you don’t even get a tiny map.

Just for fun, here is a video of a set of musical stairs in a Xi’an train station.

Regional trains

I cover the overnight trains and the super-fast trains in other posts.