In response to the challenges of passenger flow control in rush hours as a vast number of people return to work and school, the Tianjin Metro Group strongly encourage passengers to use the Tianjin Metro app to enter stations by scanning a QR code, a highly efficient way to achieve zero contact amid the COVID-19 outbreak. As part of that effort, it has updated the app by adding a new feature—heat map view of passenger flow. Passengers can check the thermal distribution of passenger traffic at any station of Tianjin Metro Line 1, Line 2, Line 3, Line 5, Line 6 and Line 9, with red, orange, yellow and green colors representing different congestion levels after upgrading the app to the latest version, which is for passengers’ reference to make travel plans reasonably. What follows is a step-by-step guide:

1. Open the Tianjin Metro app and click on the “Metro Map” icon on the front page.

2. Click on the “passenger flow” icon on the top right-hand corner to access a heat map where you can see the thermal distribution of all stations in the metro network.The color of each station varies with the changes of passenger flow at the station. Green represents “unblocked”, yellow, “basically unblocked”, orange, “mildly congested” and red, “heavily congested”.

3. If you want to locate one station, click on the“stations available” icon in the upper right corner of the page and choose the station you want to check. For example, click “Line 3”- “Yingkoudao Station”, and you can see the corresponding congestion level at the station.

The heat map, based on the calculation of the real-time number of passengers entering and leaving the stations, visualizes the overall passenger traffic across the city’s metro stations. The overall flows change dynamically with the trains in and out of the platforms. This map is only for your reference, and please subject to the actual state of the stations.

Next, the Tianjin Metro will set a heat warning threshold on its app in accordance with the principle of maintaining the distance between each passenger waiting for a train amid the COVID-19 epidemic, and adjust it dynamically with overall changes. When the epidemic is over, adjustments will also be made with the app according to the actual situation to provide the best possible display for passengers.