One of the ‘highlights’ of the new No.5 line is the conveyor belts at some of the stations, which bear a resemblance to the conveyer belts at airports. You know what I am talking about – the conveyor belts that you can lug your heavy luggage onto and slowly move to your required departure gate. Installing the conveyor belts at the subway stations gives a feeling of modernity and luxury, but is it really practical? For one, most people are not carrying heavy luggage and they’re actually in a hurry, so the conveyor belts go way too slow. Secondly, the subway system in Beijing is dealing with huge amounts of people, so do the conveyor belts have the durability to cope with this?
It seems like my questions were given a strong answer today – the conveyor belt at the Chongwenmen Station was out of order this morning. There have been too many people using the conveyor belt over the last week – it has been difficult not to bump into others and the conveyor belt has been crowded to the point of being dangerous. If the conveyor belts really prove to be useless, then it will be another example of a lack of foresight when installing electrical facilities in Beijing. There are many escalators in the city that are permanently turned off. I am not sure why they are turned off, but climbing a non-moving escalator is much harder than climbing a flight of conventional stairs. In the case of the conveyor belts at the subway station, they are definitely not an efficient way of dealing with the limited space that needs to accomodate the thousands of passengers who take the subway every day. Electrical facilities look flashy, but they are often not suitable for a sprawling city of 15 million, where things get broken very quickly.
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