Expo buses cannot make more room for passengers

• Source: Global Times
• [10:15 July 06 2010]
• Comments

Visitors make their way to buses running inside the Expo Park Monday. Photo: Ni Dandan

By Ni Dandan

As shuttle buses running inside the Expo Park remained fully packed with visitors in fuggy weather Monday, organizers said increasing rider capacity on the free transportation bringing visitors to and from pavilions is not be feasible.

Organizers shot down the idea from visitors to remove seats inside the electric buses as the daily tally of guests at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai continues to surpass 400,000.

"The ride is usually only a stop or two, so I don't think many passengers will mind standing," Chen Yingying, a visitor at the park, told the Global Times Monday.

But organizers said that removing seats to turn the environmentally friendly buses into something similar to those used at airports to transfer passengers between their gates and the runway would do little to improve the situation.

"The bottom part of most seats on the buses is actually a battery box," said Zhou Huai, head of the traffic management department at the Expo, Monday. "Even if we were to remove the seats above it, this space would still not be able to be utilized by passengers. We cannot have people standing on top of the battery boxes."

Though the most frequently rode bus line along the Expo Avenue has buses departing every some 13 seconds during peak hours, pressure on public transport inside the park remains a problem for the thousands of daily passengers.

But authorities are doing their best to accommodate as many bus passengers inside the park as possible, a challenging task considering that every day the buses serve a passenger volume equivalent to more than 13 percent of Shanghai's daily bus commuters within a 3.28-square-kilometer plot of land - an area that amounts to a mere 0.05 percent of Shanghai's entire land area, added Zhou.