Spring Festival Rush
Kids in the train stationPosted by Joel Martinsen on Thursday, January 22, 2009 at 4:00 PM
The big headline today in many papers was the passage by the State Council of a medical reform plan that will bring health care to the entire country's population by 2011 (see the New York Times for more details). Other papers focused on cross-straits issues: the son and daughter-in-law of Chen Shui-bian, Taiwan's former president, told a Taipei court that they were involved in money-laundering (see Xinhua for the story). Today's Shenyang Evening News led with the health-care headline, but devoted most of its front page to cute kids waiting to take the train home for the holidays. The caption:
Time to go home Underneath the image is a headline that notes that the peak travel time of the Spring Festival Rush has arrived. The Ministry of Railways began tabulating ridership figures for the Spring Festival Rush in 1954, The Beijing News noted in a retrospective piece that ran in yesterday's paper. It was in 1981 that the two-character abbreviation first appeared in the People's Daily. On January 18 of that year, the People's Daily spoke with the Ministry of Railways about crowded passenger trains:All Chunyun traffic: from 31 million rides in 1957 to 2.2 billion last year
The newspaper's feature notes that overcrowding has dropped substantially. In the 1990s, it was common for trains to run at double capacity over the holidays, and even higher overcrowding rates were not unheard of. Today, 20% is the prescribed overbooking rate, although at peak times this can still push 70-80%. Ticketing remains a problem, but this year, the Ministry of Railways declared that by 2012, those difficulties will be eliminated as well. Links and Sources
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