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| Passengers crowd at the hall of the railway
station in Zhengzhou, Central China's Henan Province on January 25,
2005. (newsphoto) |
The nation's rail bottleneck is back in the limelight
again as the peak Lunar New Year travel season started yesterday.
The railway network can
only adequately handle 2.74 million passengers per day on average,
890,000 fewer people than the estimated daily number of passengers
traveling each day during the holidays, railway Vice-Minister Hu
Yadong said during a news conference in Beijing yesterday.
The numerical gap might widen to as many as 1.76 million people at peak
periods, Hu added.
According to estimates from Hu'sministry, in the
next 40 days, around 145 million people are expected to travel by rail for
family reunions over
the
festival, which begins on February 9 this year.
The travel deluge is expected to hit peaks on February 4-6, 15-17 and
25-28, when migrant workers and college students and others will flock to
train stations for holiday trips back home.
A large number of people prefer trains because of
their economy and safety.
The annual exodus has begun early in many major cities, where officials
have organized special,low-priced trains to take migrant workers and
students out of town in advance of the huge human throngs expected later.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Railways has ordered 15 to 20 per centin
train ticket price increases for the third straight year to control
passenger volumes over the holidays.
However, demand is expected to stay high and many cities have scrambled
to add trains to their networks to keep pace.
Some 260 pairs of temporary trains have been added to transport
passengers, bringing the number of trains running on the railways to 646
pairs across the country,the ministry indicated.
Buying a rail ticket has become a difficult task, with long lines
snaking from ticket booths, as people shiver in the cold.
Wang Min, director-general of the railway ministry's planning department,
attributes the headaches to existing railway bottlenecks.
"The inadequate railway capacity fails to meet the demands of intensive
passenger flows, which leads to passenger competition for tickets," Wang
said.
The problem faced in peak travel periods each year lies in the fact
that the development of railways lags far behind the nation's economic
growth, he added.
The Ministry of Railways is working to attract additional investment in
to the sector to expand the railways, including foreign and private
capital, Wang said.
Currently, the nation's railway construction is financed by the central government
and local governments." Market access will be widened to
enterprises to encourage them to invest their capital into railway
projects," Wang said.
Besides rail transport, the number of road and aviation passenger trips
are also estimated to rise 3.5 per cent to 1.79 billion and 12.5 per cent
to12.6 million compared with the same period last year.
(China Daily) | 
Updated: 2005-01-26 13:45