Public Transportation - Buses and the Subway 公共交通-公共汽车和地铁
Nanjing has a busy bus system and a new and efficient subway line.
Buses
Buses without air conditioning cost 1 yuan per trip and buses with air conditioning cost 2 yuan. The extra yuan is surely worth it in the steamy summers. You can pay with an IC card or with 1 yuan coins. No change is given.
The bus stops can appear quite hectic. There are often a hundred people at one station, but buses arrive so frequently that there may be 3 or 4 buses stopped at one station at the same time.
If you don’t read Chinese it would be quite diificult to navigate the bus routes without planning ahead. The signs which display bus routes are only written in Chinese characters.
The roads in the Xinjiekou and Gulou often suffer from intense traffic jams in the middle of the day.
Subway
The No. 1 North-South subway line was put into operation in 2005. It has a length of 22 kilometers and has 16 stops.
The Nanjing Railway Station Station (yes I said station twice) connects so smoothly with The Nanjing Railway Station that you will not even realize they are two separate stations. This is very convenient for transporting large luggage in and out of the Nanjing Train Station.
Tickets cost between 2 and 4 yuan. It is a bit cheaper to use an IC card (see bellow). The ticket machines can take bills or coins and do give change.
The ticket machines also have English and are quite easy to use. They dispense blue tokens. These tokens are to be swiped on the way in and deposited on the way out. That is, when you approach the train you just swipe the token over the pad, and as you head upstairs to exit the station you deposit the token in the machine. Since the Subway was opened they have had plenty of staff on hand to assist passengers with purchasing and using tokens.
Trains arrive every 4 to 8 minutes and run between 6:30am and 10:00pm.
Click here for a map of Nanjing City or here for a map of the subway system only.
For more information (in Chinese) check www.nj-dt.com.
IC Card
An IC card can be used to access both the buses and the subway. The IC card is called a “yue piao”(月票). It can be recharged inside subway stations but can only be purchased at Huaxia Bank (华夏银行). Each branch of Huaxia bank has a dedicated counter for this purpose. It is also possible to recharge a yue piao at some Suguo convenience stores.
The IC card gives you a 20% discount on bus fares and a very small discount for the subway. On buses the card can be swiped several times to pay for you and your friends. However, the IC card can only be swiped once per trip on the subway.
Extra Information About the Subway
The Nanjing municipal government first committed to building a subway line in 1984. However, the plan was not carried out until 2001. After four years of hard work and expenditures totaling more than 8.5 billion yuan (about 1billion USD), the No. 1 subway line began operating in August of 2005.
Le Metro was designed by the French company ALTSOM. Each train has a capacity of 1860 people.
The No. 2 East-West line, with a length of 25 kilometers, is already under construction. It is planned to be completed in 2008.