Many passengers complained that they were constantly being annoyed by commercials broadcast in buses, the Guangzhou Daily said Tuesday.

Some passengers had missed the stops they needed to get off at due to the lengthy ads. A resident surnamed Cheng said she took a bus from Tianhe to Dongshan the other day and an ad for a Web site was broadcast whenever the bus pulled into a stop. The ad lasted more than half a minute before the name of the stop could be announced. When she finally heard the radio announcing, “We've arrived at the Yangcheng Evening News stop,” Cheng found the bus had started again with the door already shut. “I had to walk 15 minutes in the sun to get back to the stop I missed,” she complained.

On a bus from Zhongshan Road 8 to Dongshan District, a medicine commercial was broadcast several times between two stops and lasted 20 seconds each time, the report said. A man complained he could miss a phone call if the ad coincided with the ring of his mobile phone. Many other passengers said they were annoyed by a monotonous voice repeatedly reading the ads in hot summer. “The repeated promise that a certain medicine will cure your skin disease or improve your sexual ability simply makes me feel sick,” said another man.

However, a bus company official said the ads didn't break any rules and commercials were broadcast on buses in many other Chinese cities. He promised to consider the feelings of passengers and research a better scheme for broadcasting ads.

An official with Guangzhou's administration for industry and commerce said his department would ban advertisements with illegal or false contents but could do nothing about those commercials whose only guilt was being annoying.

A Beijing resident took the city's industrial and commercial authorities to court in May because they did not give a satisfactory reply to his complaints about bus ads. The authorities said the complaints concerned noise in public areas and should fall in the responsibility of the environmental bureau.

(Shenzhen Daily August 10, 2005)