Bus parking spots relief for traffic
Dongchang Road between Dongtai Road and Puming Road, which previously had 50 parking slots for cars, now enables up to 21 tourist buses to park there.
PARKING spots for tour buses on Dongchang Road is relieving traffic pressure in Lujiazui tourist zone.
“Most tourist buses need parking only for up to 1.5 hours, which means that about 120 buses can use the 21 slots from 7am to 11pm every day,” said Zhang Qing, a traffic police officer in the area. The slots are between Dongtai Road and Puming Road on Dongchang Road.
Meanwhile, tourist bus drivers are encouraged to use seven spots in the area to pick up and drop passengers that include three near the Oriental Pearl Tower and one near Jinmao Tower, Shanghai World Financial Center, Shanghai Ocean Aquarium and Shanghai Tower.
It’s estimated that more than 450 tourist buses go through this area every day. May 1 this year saw a record when 708 buses came and went. Such heavy volumes pose a heavy traffic burden on the area, which has about 1,400 companies within its 1.7 square kilometers.
Tourist buses were able to park on Yincheng Road M. between Huayuanshiqiao Road and Lujiazui Ring Road before the second half of 2015, but the parking space was shut down after the opening of Shanghai Tower.
Tourist buses used to block the traffic around the Oriental Pearl Tower, Jinmao Tower and Shanghai Tower — especially during peak hours, with complaints about illegal parking of the buses increasingly reaching the police.
Since July 9 when the new parking spot on Dongchang Road was put into use, police said they had found only about 20 illegally parked tourist buses a day in the area, down from 70 previously.
Zhou Xiaocheng, another traffic police officer, said the police plan to propose to the government to open a second exclusive parking spot for tourist buses on Binjiang Avenue between Zhangyang Road and Shangcheng Road.
