Tokyo’s oldest subway line should be less crowded for sightseers starting next month.

The Tokyo Metro’s Ginza Line, as you can probably guess from its name, has a stop in the city’s upscale Ginza district. It also has stations in fashionable Omotesando, right by the boutiques and flagship fashion stores of Harajuku, and also Ueno, famous for its park and museums. And then there are the two endpoints of the line, Shibuya and Asakusa, which are among the top tourism destinations in Tokyo, the former representing its modern big-city vibes and the latter its traditional old-town roots.

That makes the Ginza Line one of the most useful subway routes for travel and leisure outings in Tokyo, and its geographic orientation, stretching from the southwest to the northeast corners of downtown, provide for all sort of transfer points to other subway and train lines. However, “useful” doesn’t necessarily always mean “easy to use,” and something the Ginza Line has going against it is that it’s the oldest subway line in Tokyo, and actually the oldest subway line in Asia.

▼ A Ginza Line poster from 1927, the year it started service

The problem isn’t that the Ginza Line’s trains are old, since the carriages have been replaced with new models several times in the near-century trains have been running down its tracks. However, if you’ve ever ridden on the Ginza Line, you might have noticed that its carriages are narrower than the ones on most other Tokyo subway lines. Back when the Ginza Line was being built, Tokyo was a much smaller town than it is today, and so the tunnels that were dug were, compared to the standards of today, small. Smaller tunnels mean smaller trains, and smaller trains mean more crowded trains.

Adding more cars to make the trains longer isn’t a simple fix to the problem, since longer trains would require longer station platforms, which would in turn require new digging. However, even if wider trains and longer trains are both out of the question, Tokyo Metro does have a plan to make the Ginza Line less congested: more trains.

Starting next month, Tokyo Metro says it will be running an additional 58 trains daily between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. on Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays. In doing so, the wait time between trains will be reduced from 4 minutes to 3 minutes and 20 seconds, which should make for a smoother flow of passengers with less bottlenecking on station platforms.

Currently there are no announced plans to add additional trains at other times, for example during the weekday commuting rush hours, but the change should make for a more pleasant experience for anyone making a weekend visit to Sensoji Temple in Asakusa, the Nintendo Tokyo specialty store in Shibuya, or anywhere in between.

The extra trains are scheduled to start running on November 1.

Source: Tokyo Metro
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