by Peng Jie, EW Correspondent
With its growing urban population and the number of vehicles, pedestrian overpasses, or overhead cross-street bridges, have been built in Beijing wherever the heavy flows of both automobiles and pedestrians meet on the road. With the number of vehicles nearing 1.9 million and the city population of around 10 million in the urban area, the recent decade has seen a great number of pedestrian overpasses built in Beijing, short and long, with and without escalators.
The old pedestrian overpass of Xidan, where I took a photo for a report in 1996 (ELEVATOR WORLD, March 1996), has been modernized to form an approximately 1,000-meter-long loop way, together with a new one which lies about 400 meters to its south, with paved walkways passing in front of or through shops on two or three levels. The loop way not only provides for a pedestrian-friendly passage across a busy street, but also offers shopping spaces in one section along the street to make it fully compatible with the commercial environment. Stair-cased entrances with guiding signs are available here and there leading pedestrians to the shops they want to visit. The cross-road sections or the overpasses of the loop way are fully glass screened to protect people from the elements, and sections of the loop way are paved with soft synthetic rubber coverings for walking comfort. However, there are no direct escalator installations to the loop way to date.
As it is human nature to take a short cut wherever possible, pedestrians tend to cross the street following a direct line on the road, halting the traffic rather than walk with effort to a nearby stair-cased entrance and go up and down the overpass. This is the case with the Xidan overpass project. An effective one should be designed as human-friendly as possible with its entrances located exactly at or at least as near as possible to where people tend to gather together to cross the street in a natural way. This could be done by observation and pedestrian flow studies prior to designing. It is also important to offer the pedestrians an easy way to use the overpass system, that is, to construct an automated passage for them with installations of escalators and autowalks. Elevator and escalator suppliers are experts to assist in traffic analysis in the early stage of designing. If such automated cross-street facilities with entrances wherever pedestrians gather to cross the street are made available to them, few pedestrians would wait or hurry to break off the automobile traffic at the risk of life.
If the Xidan pedestrian overpass project is an option to pedestrians, the twin overpass project at the Beijing Western Railway Station turns out to be a must for pedestrian safety. It was listed as one of the merits the municipality government planned for the citizens in 2002. The bridges are located in the northern square, to which crossroads used to be a necessary passage for the pedestrians who were going to take a bus at or coming over from the bus stop platforms from across the motorway on which the traffic has grown heavy since the railway station became operational in January 1996. This does not only cause delay for both vehicles and pedestrians but also places the latter vulnerable to traffic accidents due to the fact that the original solution in design failed to take into full consideration the formidable contradiction between the heavy flows of pedestrians and vehicles on both sides of the T-shaped crossroads.
The two 89-meter-long steel structures appeared over the motorways and the square overnight on December 16, 2002. It was a project for the sake of the pedestrian's safety. The overpasses had to span over the whole square including another underground two-way motorway for high-speed passing vehicles. To handle the pedestrian traffic, each of the main structures offers a passenger walkway as wide as six meters. However, the passage could be more user-friendly if with autowalk installations. Each overpass entrance is equipped with a pair of heavy-duty escalators by Xizi Otis. The contractor of the installation was Beijing Golden House Co. with ISO 9000/2000 certification. It took them two weeks to complete the job in the coldest days of winter.
The eight escalators, two at an entrance of the overpasses, have imported traction machines with the reinforced trusses for heavy-duty public transport. With glass balustrade panels, the escalators look in harmony with the surrounding architectural vision. Their basic specifications include the five-meter rise, the one-meter width and the 30° in angle of inclination. The installations are semi-sheltered, i.e., in spite of an overhead glass roof, rain and snow could intrude from the lower open sides. A number of up-to-date technical solutions are taken into consideration in design including the use of stainless-steel steps and a warming system beneath the steps. The application of the reinforced steps of stainless steel prevents the steps from getting rusty due to moisture caused by rain, snow and fog, whereas the step-warming system keeps the steps constantly warm in winter so that no ice or snow remains on the steps. The three heating rollers for each escalator imported from Germany are located at equal distance in between beneath the steps in line. The temperature controls of the warming system are supplied by Omron Japan. The electrical parts such as switches are all of waterproof design.
There are hundreds of pedestrian overpasses in Beijing, some used to serve pedestrians as a safe overhead link and a viewing platform for people in the neighborhood just like the one at Caishikou, some for specified pedestrian groups such as school children. An important feature in designing a pedestrian overpass today is for its outlook and style to match the architectural environment. Some designs are exceptionally good with great attention to the compatibility with the architectural surroundings such as those at Longfusi Temple, Changdian and Chaowai respectively. Some form a pedestrian loop to divert the shopping crowds like the one in Xidan, some link four diagonal corners of a crossroads, but most of them are simple in design, providing people with a safe overhead passage to cross a road.
Escalators and autowalks are instrumental in designing user-friendly pedestrian overpasses at present and in the future because they make the overpass system readily accessible to pedestrians. If the pedestrians enjoy taking the overpass which is user-friendly enough, they would not wait for the vehicle traffic to break or hurry to break it at the risk of life on a busy road. Some ovserpasses in Beijing have had escalator installations such as the one at Chaowai and the twin overpass system at Beijing Western Railway Station. We would expect to see new overpasses with both escalators and autowalks appear in Beijing in the future.