Standing room only: Guangzhou train carriages stripped of seats, racks to fit in more rush-hour commuters

There is standing room only in parts of some underground train carriages in China’s southern port city of Guangzhou after seats and luggage racks were removed to boost peak-hour passenger capacity, mainland media reports.

The changes have been made to 29 trains running between 15 different stations on Guangzhou Metro Corp’s Line 3, in Guangdong province, which carried 1.62 million every day last month, the Guangzhou Daily reported.

The removal of a small area of seating and passenger racks at the ends of some carriages means each train can now comfortably hold an extra 46 passengers, while during the rush-hour periods – when passengers are tightly packed together – a total of 78 extra passengers can be accommodated, the newspaper said.

The Line 3 trains carried 24 per cent of all the passengers using the Guangzhou metro and were always overloaded during peak hours, the newspaper reported.

The metro company had also increased the number and frequency of trains during the morning and evening rush-hour period to try to ease peak-hour overcrowding, it said.

Although the average waiting time between trains had been reduced from seven minutes 50 seconds to two minutes 20 seconds, the capacity of trains was still unable to meet the rising demand from the increasing number of travellers, the report said.