Bus fares in Shanghai’s urban and rural areas are to be harmonised by end of June. The special bus fare plan, which was initiated on 1 April and will take three months to roll out across the entire municipality, will cover 16,600 buses on 1,041 bus routes. Under the scheme, passengers will pay only Rmb1 if they change to another bus within two hours of boarding first bus.

In another development, a public consultation process on bus reform in Chongqing has resulted in its postponement. The plan related to a raft of measures concerning management structure, ownership, consolidation of routes, and services and pricing. A proposal to increase bus fares was not well received in the current economic climate.