Talking Travel: Great Wall Limits Daily Visits, Bike-Only Highway Finally Opens, and First Subway 5G Network Launches

Talking Travel; your roundup of Beijing's latest transportation-related news. 

Four more Fast Trains to Beidaihe and Qinhuangdao

Beidaihe’s cool coastal climate and the proximity to Beijing make it ideal for a weekend away from the hustle and bustle of Beijing. It's now even easier to escape to the seaside with four new fast trains (fuxinghao) to Beidaihe (until Jun 25) and four new fast trains to Qinhuangdao (until Jun 23), according to Beijing News. Those trains going to Qinhuangdao also stop at Beidaihe. The increased number of trains will reduce the time between services to less than half an hour, which may be convenient on paper but may also mean we can expect the resorts to be more crowded than usual this summer.
 

Badaling Great Wall to limit daily visitors to 65,000

The Badaling portion of the Great Wall will roll out their online reservation system on Jun 1 so as to cap the number of daily visitors to 65,000, according to Beijing News. This high limit is unlikely to have any impact on crowd sizes except during peak periods such as public holidays.

As of Jun 1, all visitors will be required to reserve their ticket via Badaling’s official ticketing website or via their WeChat account (ID:GreatWall-badaling) either as an individual or as part of a group. Tourists can only book seven days ahead of their planned visit.

As one of Beijing’s iconic tourist sites, Badaling Great Wall (also pictured at the top) had a whopping 9.9 million visitors in 2018, but daily numbers vary greatly between offseason and peak season, when the number of people can easily exceed the number of what is deemed safe for the wall to handle.
 

Beijing's first bike-only highway to open this week

Beijing's first bike-only highway will (finally) open this week, as reported by Beijing Daily. As we wrote back in May of last year, when the project was first announced, the six-meter-wide will accommodate two-way, four-lane bicycle traffic and is designed without any traffic lights whatsoever. To prevent it from becoming too congested, the road will only have a total of eight exits and entrances.

Speeds are limited to 15km/hr on the highway, which runs 6.5km from Huilongguan in Changping District to Shangdi in Haidian District. Pedestrians, electric bikes, and other vehicles will not be allowed to access the path though we're still unsure how this will be enforced.
 

Subway Line 16 covered by 5G signal

BeijingMTR, who operates Beijing subway lines 4, 14, 16, as well as the Daxing Line, has announced that Line 16's 10 stations are now completely covered by 5G, making it the first subway line to have 5G coverage in China.

Installation of the 5G network began in early May of this year and took two weeks to finish. The signal covers the line as well as the station halls. Download speeds can reach as high as 933Mbp.

The company says now they are working on installing similar 5G networks on the Daxing Line and Line 14.

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Email: kuang@thebeijinger.com
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Photos: refoxrelocation.com, Beijing News, Weibo, Qianlong, Pixabay