For a while now I’ve been trying to figure out why the buses in Suzhou are a bit … late … arriving at the bus stops when attempting to ride one. There are no published arrival/departure schedules — apart from general route info — but there are these neat looking electronic screens that tell you which busses are currently headed to the station and how far away it is from the station.
Silly me naturally though the numbers on the right were how many minutes each bus was away from that station. But no! A colleague finally told me that it’s the number of stops away to give “relative distance” and not time. Ugggh. That makes sense now why it seems like a bus that is “4” away takes 8 – 16 minutes to arrive.
It’s a little hard to see in the picture above, but there are paper “schedules” for the routes the busses take. Below you’ll find a zoomed-in picture.
From what I can determine to be true at this point, and who knows if it is true information as I did get the “stops away from” wrong …
- The big number on the left, 120, is the bus route.
- To the right of the bus route number, the bus operating hours are listed.
- This one starts running at 6am and the last run is at 10pm.
- Note! This does not mean the bus will be at this stop at 6am & 10pm, but instead a bus will appear at this station at some point between those hours and potentially just after the latest one. Confusing!
- The last two lines below the bus route hours are in pink writing, indicating the type of payments accepted (I think). Not all busses accept debit cards, but this one seems to as the Quick Union Pay logo is shown. (It’s best to get a transit card or have some coins on you.)
- The QR Code is something I’ve not nor seen anyone scan. I’m venturing to guess it’s just general bus information and not all that helpful.
- The vertical Chinese characters to the right of the QR Code lists each of the named bus stops.
- The pink named bus stop is your current location.
- In this example, that would be 圆融天幕/yuan rong tian mu.
- The blue half-arrow along the bottom points in the direction the bus is traveling so you can determine which are the next stops.
It appears that the busses will display how many stops away (站距/zhàn jù, or literally “station distance”) they are but the subways, oh the subways, they display how many minutes away the next train is. So yeah, that’s the source of my confusion!
Ever make such a mistake when traveling abroad? How about missing the last train or bus of the night and needing to make your way home by other means? Leave a comment and start the discussion in this judgment free zone. (Haha, yeah right … judgment free!)