Shanghai Long-Distance Bus Terminal: The North Square's Highway Gate

Basic information

This piece is about a "gate" — not the gate of a scenic spot, but the gate through which countless people left Shanghai and came back to Shanghai.

First, the "north hub"

Shanghai Railway Station is the railway's gate, and the Long-Distance Bus Terminal is the highway's gate — two gates back to back, with Metro Lines 1, 3 and 4 and more than twenty bus routes threading between them.

Railway, long-distance bus, metro, city bus and taxi — five kinds of transport crammed into one street corner — that is the "north hub": the northern half of Shanghai's land gateway.

When the "new station" opened in 1987, only the railway's gate was here. Passengers arriving by train who wanted to change to a long-distance bus had to work out how; and the long-distance buses had no presentable "terminal" at all. This gap had to wait until 2005 to be filled.

Where it came from: two old stations made one

The Long-Distance Bus Terminal did not appear out of thin air; it was formed by merging two older stations:

• the Zhixin Bunye Cheng coach station — the name tells you it guarded the Bunye Cheng area;
• the Zhixin North Square coach station — it guarded the north square of the railway station.

Their operator, the Shanghai Zhixin Group, transferred all the passenger routes and business under its name to the new terminal. It was registered in July 2001, and nearly four more years went into building it — what the word "central" in its name gathered up was long-distance routes scattered all over the place.

2005: the opening, and a small episode

There was a small hitch in the terminal's opening.

On 25 January 2005 it received its first passengers, and it ran normally for forty days through that year's Spring Festival rush. But as soon as the rush ended, the station temporarily closed its doors — the explanation given outside was that "construction is still unfinished". (Press comment at the time said the developer had other ideas about how the takings should be divided.)

After several twists, it was not until May that year that the station was put back into service; and on 12 August the Shanghai Long-Distance Bus Terminal was formally opened. That same year it was approved as a first-class long-distance passenger station.

To build a long-distance bus terminal in the "age of the train" was the judgement of that era: the railway took the trunk lines, the highway took the capillaries — in the home-going crowds of the Spring Festival, the long-distance coaches carried that leg of the journey the railway could not reach.

The figures inside thirty thousand square metres

• a site of 30,000 m² and a main building of 53,911 m²;
• 56 departure bays dispatching at once, 28 ticket gates and 24 ticket windows (which can rise to 43 at peak times);
• 378 routes, linking Shanghai to more than 130 prefecture-level cities in 23 provinces, regions and municipalities across the country and to more than 360 cities at county level and above — many a small county town the railway cannot reach is served from here by a single coach;
• on ordinary days more than 40,000 passengers a day, and at the height of the Spring Festival period as many as 78,000 — in those few days the air of the waiting hall was full of the sound of suitcase wheels rolling over the floor.

It was long the first in Shanghai for the number of highway passengers sent and received, accounting for around forty per cent of the city's total.

The two ends of one ticket

For this city, the meaning of the Long-Distance Bus Terminal is not only in "passenger flow".

Its ticket windows have Shanghai at one end and countless county towns at the other. Those who come to Shanghai to work land here — they may not understand their first sentence of Shanghainese, but their first stop is here; those going home for the New Year set out from here too — buying a seat on an overnight extra service and eating a bowl of noodles by the light of the waiting hall.

If Shanghai Railway Station is chiefly responsible for "faraway places", then what the Long-Distance Bus Terminal is responsible for is the more particular, smaller place names within those faraway places: a county, a town, a home the railway does not reach.

What came later

• in 2010 the Shanghai–Nanjing intercity railway opened, and passenger flow towards Nanjing fell sharply — the terminal's operator even had to carry goods on the coaches of its Shanghai–Nanjing services to keep them profitable; the squeeze that the high-speed-rail era put on long-distance road transport began right here;
• around 2013 the waiting hall and ticket windows were converted one after another into commercial facilities — this was not all resignation: the station had "left an opening" from the start of its design, with the waiting hall laid out along the road and a storey height the same as a shopping mall, prepared from the beginning to be turned to commercial use later; the ticket office was later moved underground at the railway station;
• in 2016 an express line direct to Shanghai Disneyland was opened; in 2017–2018, passengers could board directly with an ID card and a QR code, and this was upgraded again to facial-recognition entry — this "highway gateway" is learning to grow lighter too.

What to see here today

• watch a "hub interchange" once: step out of the railway station's north square and a few minutes' walk brings you to the terminal's station area, where railway, metro, city bus and long-distance bus each hold their place at the same crossing — this is the physical version of "integrated interchange" from a town-planning textbook;
• fix its sense of position: 1666 Zhongxing Road, the face behind the railway station. Facing the station's front (the south square) are the glass curtain walls of Bunye Cheng; guarding its back (the north square) are the bus terminal and the residential neighbourhoods — one south, one north, two generations of Zhabei;
• one warning: on ordinary days the flow inside the station is steady, but during the Spring Festival rush please do not go there to join the crowd — if you want to see the "spectacle of the crowds", reading the news is enough.

Connections

• Sub-district：Zhijiang West Road Subdistrict
• See also：Shanghai Railway Station, Zhijiang West Road Subdistrict, 8. Thirty Years of Catching Up

Sources: the terminal's registration date (31 July 2001), its opening (into operation in May 2005, formally opened on 12 August), its address (1666 Zhongxing Road and its four boundaries), its belonging to Shanghai Zhixin (Group) Co., Ltd., its integration of the Zhixin Bunye Cheng coach station and the Zhixin North Square coach station, its site of 30,000 square metres, its main building of 53,911 square metres, its 28 ticket gates, 24 ticket windows and 56 departure bays, its 378 inter-provincial routes reaching more than 130 prefecture-level cities and more than 360 cities at county level and above in 23 provinces, regions and municipalities, its more than 1,200 departures a day, its more than 40,000 passengers a day, its 2,048 departures and 78,000 passengers on a Spring Festival peak day, and its approval in 2005 as a first-class long-distance passenger station follow the terminal's official website "Station profile" and the Sogou Baike and Chinese Encyclopaedia entries "Shanghai Long-Distance Bus Passenger Terminal" (cross-checked against several sources, Grade B); "the largest bus station in Asia on opening" follows the wikiwand entry "Shanghai Long-Distance Bus Passenger Terminal" (Grade C); the account of its receiving its first passengers on 25 January 2005, its temporary closure after the Spring Festival rush and its formal operation on 12 August follows reports in Xiaokang magazine (as relayed by wikiwand, Grade C); the sharp fall in passenger flow after the opening of the Shanghai–Nanjing intercity railway in 2010 and the carriage of goods on the coaches, the conversion of the waiting hall into commercial facilities around 2013, the commercial space reserved at the design stage, the Disneyland express line of 2016 and ID-card QR-code and facial-recognition entry in 2017–2018 follow the wikiwand entry "Shanghai Long-Distance Bus Passenger Terminal" (Grade C); its long standing as first in Shanghai for highway passengers sent and received, at around forty per cent of the city's total, follows the terminal's official website (Grade B). The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.