The death of a passenger on the Shanghai Metro recently has got Nanjing’s commuters talking, and some worrying. But rest assured, the Nanjing Metro remains one of the safest in the world, partly due to the technology employed on the doors installed throughout.
At about 16:30 on 22 January, an elderly female passenger at Qi’an Lu Station of Shanghai Metro Line 15 became clamped by the screen door while getting off the train.
Staff rushed forward to try to help her, but after being sent to hospital, the passenger nevertheless still died. The incident attracted the attention of many a Nanjing Metro user, wondering whether there exists the possibility of a similar fate here.
Fortunately, the answer is absolutely not. For the doors on every last train and in every station on the Nanjing Metro network are equipped with that known as an “anti-pinch function”.
It’s not even as if the technology is that sophisticated. The function works by way of an electrical circuit monitoring how much power is being used to close the doors. If excessive, then something is preventing the door’s normal operation. Electronics then simply cause the doors to open instead of close.
Reporters for the Yangtze Evening News spoke with a representative of the Nanjing Metro yesterday, 25 January. In that conversation, it was confirmed that stations on all lines of the Nanjing Metro have been installed with screen doors equipped with the anti-pinch function.
“If passengers are about to be caught by the closing of the screen door, please don’t panic. The sliding door will pop open automatically”, said the rep.
It was also further learned that the anti-pinch feature was installed during the building of all Nanjing’s metro lines, with the exception of Line 1. It being the oldest, with construction beginning at the turn of the millennium, the technology was added at a later date.
But there would be little point to the platform-screen doors in the stations having the technology installed if the same was not true for the doors on the trains. And so it is.
In addition, if the anti-pinch feature in any pair of doors on a train is activated, the train will not depart until all its doors and the platform-screen doors are also safely closed.
