[photopress:it_Beijing_subway.jpg,full,alignright]The Beijing subway has stopped using paper tickets that have been in use for 38 years.
The Beijing Daily reports a new automatic fare collection (AFC) system is being installed in all subways stations in the Chinese capital.
Passengers will need to produce their magnetic strip tickets or mass transit smart cards twice when going through the system machines, both entering and exiting the gates.
Jia Peng, a Beijing Subway Company official, said the new AFC system would help collect information on how many people entered and exited the subways at different time periods of a day. The data would help the company to better organize the frequency of trains.
In addition, the magnetic strip tickets that have replaced the paper tickets could be used repeatedly — about 2,500 to 3,000 times — which saves a lot of paper.
Beijing, the host city of this summer’s Olympic Games, now has five subway lines with 140 kilometers of track, transporting millions of passengers daily. It plans to add three subway lines this year and reach 200 km in length.
Worldwide, paper tickets are disappearing and smart cards taking over. The next step will be where one smart card covers all forms of transportation except, perhaps, overseas flight.
Source: China Daily