Miracle of Chinese spring festival transportation
Chinese maintain the tradition of family reunion during the spring festival. So every year piror the Chinese new year, people travel back to their hometown where their parents and siblings live. Due to the working opportunity and city’s economical prosperity, there are many people left rural areas and came to work in the urban region. Although some of the second-their cities robustly grew in the last ten year, there are still immense amounts of non-local workers live in the Chinese most developed cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. For instance, in 2014 Beijing’s exogenous population are more than eight million. Hence when ever is Luna's new year, these people have to move through the Chinese transportation system. It is the largest cyclical population migration activity throughout the world, because every year over 3.6 billion passengers will utilize water, air and road transport to surge to their destination. Genuinely, this is a Chinese miracle which can hardly be replicated by any other countries around the world.
Most passengers choose the train as their transportation, because the ticket is relatively cheap and many rural regions do not have airport. Even with the world second largest railway system and the world top high speed railway network, the demand of the tickets in the spring festival period is overwhelming. Corresponding to this excess of demand situation, the sale of the train ticket swill start 20 days before the Chinese new year. Similar to Christmas, Chinese will celebrate with their family in the new year's day, thereby these 20 days become the yearly competition with sweat and tears. People would queue overnight in front of the ticket selling station, in order to obtain the train ticket that could carry them home. In the past decade, Chinese's railway ministry implemented various ticketing methods, including online booking and through the phone. However, the tremendous quantity of demand causes these applications not very effective. Actually, it did reduce the line at the ticketing station, in replace with the congestion on the hotline and the website. As a corollary, ticket scalpers were induced by the scenario and make the ticket even harder to acquirer. In fact, these ticket scalpers are plotting together with the staff of the railway department, who illegally holds back ticket for personal gain. As a consequence, more and more people tend to use other travel methods like coach or carpooling. Especially after the government proclaim the policy of free highway toll during the holidays. Besides that, many people are traveling with their motorcycles since last year, and the local government has to establish rest stations, which offer free food and water for the purpose to let these travellers rest a bit on their route.
No matter which method we choose to travel, the propeller for Chinese to endeavor is always the will to enjoy this important date with family. I wish all of them to be safe on their journey and have a pleasant new year holiday
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