Maternity plea for Metro
More facilities for parents and children are needed at the city’s Metro stations, according to Li Teng, a Shanghai People’s Congress deputy.
Li has drafted a proposal on the issue for the city’s Two Sessions in January.
Shanghai Metro responded this week, saying that all stations on Metro lines opened after 2017 had a third toilet with maternity facilities — a total of 42 stations on Line 17 and the extensions to Lines 5, 9 and 13.
Only a few of the older stations had such facilities. Shanghai Metro said it would be hard to add facilities due to insufficient space.
“I think the reply from Shanghai Metro is a positive signal,” Li told Shanghai Daily. “They said they will start to perfect the signs in the stations where maternity facilities are already installed.”
The third toilets, Shanghai Metro said, are for disabled passengers and parents with young children.
“A mother can take her 2-year-old son to the third toilet so that the little boy won’t have to use the women’s toilet, so can fathers with their little girls,” said a Metro official. “We have also installed a diaper-changing station and a baby chair in the third toilet.”
Shanghai Daily visited some stations, with or without such facilities, to see what staff and passengers thought.
At Zhuguang Road on Line 17, the third toilet looked as if it had just been built.
The toilet has an electronic sliding door which can be locked from inside. There was a diaper-changing station, a toilet for disabled people and a urinal for small boys.
A sanitation worker surnamed Lu said he checked the toilet roughly every hour to clean the facilities if necessary. However, he said few people used the toilet.
“Sometimes no one uses the third toilet to change diapers on my shift,” said Lu, who works at the station from 6am to 5pm.
At Dongming Road on Line 13, the third toilet is at one end of the station platform with a sign at its entrance.
A sanitation worker surnamed Wang said the toilet was seldom used. Wang said that sometimes she saw mothers taking their children there to change their diapers, but that would be quite rare.
“Five would be the maximum number of parents using the maternity facilities at the station as far as I know,” she said.
Lilian Hao, mother of a 5-year-old girl, said she had used nursery rooms in shopping malls a couple of times to change diapers when her daughter was an infant.
“I took a feeding bottle with me wherever I went when she was little,” said Hao. “I would change the diaper before we left home and try not to be away from home for too long.”
She said the Dongming Road station is a small one, so it doesn't matter much if it has a nursery room or not. “But with larger stations, the problem may stand out,” she said.
Li, mother of a 3-month-old baby, said: “It is very inconvenient for young mothers like me to find a nursery room when taking the Metro. Sometimes it’s a little embarrassing because you have to feed your baby when she starts to cry in public.”
Shanghai Metro’s Metro Daduhui app has information on the location of toilets at stations, but there's no mention of the third toilets and maternity facilities.
Xujiahui station, where Lines 1, 9 and 11 meet, has a nursery room near exit 15. Yet when a Shanghai Daily reporter arrived, it was locked.
A notice on the door advised passengers who needed to use the room to call station attendants.
Gong, a member of staff at the station, told Shanghai Daily that hardly anyone would ask to use the room.
“We receive requests from mothers about 10 times a month,” she said. “But when they use the room to feed or change nappies for the baby, we would stand guard at the entrance to prevent males from accidentally walking in.”
A passenger, Wu, said she had once looked for a nursery room at the station, but the staff didn’t tell her there was one.
“I ended up changing my baby’s diaper in the bathroom for he was crying out so loud,” said Wu. “It was smelly and small, you know, public restrooms.”
At the Shanghai Zoo station on Line 10, there is a nursery room near exit 1. Decorated with colorful cartoon figures and pictures, it is easy to spot.
The room has no door, instead a curtain hangs at the entrance. From outside you can see a table and two chairs in the room. Outside the room, a notice on the wall reads: “Women Only.”
Station staff told Shanghai Daily that since the station is one of the major ways to get to the zoo, many parents with children come and go.
“We specifically designed the room for them in case they need to feed the baby,” said one.
The room was often occupied at weekends, she said.
A cleaner said she would take away any garbage soon after a mother changed a diaper.
When parents taking children to the zoo were asked what they thought about the room, one said she wouldn’t go there as “it doesn’t even have a door to protect my privacy.”
Shanghai Metro said there used to be a nursery room at People’s Square Station, but it had been removed.
“Homeless people wandered into the room,” said an official. “The best we could do was to ask them to leave, they for most of the time would ignore us.”
The official said the dilemma the company faces is not only insufficient space in old stations but also the difficulty of managing people.
“I may just do it in the bathroom,” said Elaine Teng, an expat working in Shanghai who has a 4-year-old son. “I’m always fully prepared when I go out with my baby, diapers, towels, tissues and deodorant.”
Teng, from the UK, said there were diaper-changing stations in bathrooms at Metro stations in Britain but nothing for breastfeeding.
Last year, the Shanghai Health Commission issued a series of suggestions encouraging more public spaces in the city to install maternity facilities. Interchange Metro stations were included.
In his proposal, Li argues that at least one nursery room should be built for every 10 stops in the Metro network.
“I think it’s a good start that Shanghai Metro is now paying more attention to the issue,” Li told Shanghai Daily. “I understand it is not easy, especially with the old stations, some of which didn’t even have a bathroom when first built.”
Li suggested Shanghai Metro take baby steps and first build some temporary maternity facilities at main stations.
Shanghai Metro said it will work on the possibility of building more facilities.
The third toilet at Line 13's Chengshan Road station opened last year.
The diaper changing station and the baby chair in the third toilet at Line 13's Dongming Road station.
The nursery room at the Shanghai Zoo station on Line 10. Staff opened the space because of the number of parents and children using the station.
