More passengers equals more subway problems in capital

With the growing flow of passengers into the urban subway system, Beijing is experiencing a greater incidence of minor malfunctions.

Beijing's subway trains have broken down 39 times so far this year, logging at least one failure per week, and 18 of them were caused by signal failures, according to Beijing Youth Daily report on Monday, which calculated the failures based on information posted on the Beijing subway's micro blog.

But according to Jia Peng, spokesman for Beijing Mass Transit Railway Operation Corp, which operates 14 lines, the data are unreliable as they were attained in a non-scientific way.