China Tries (And Fails) To Fix Rail Tickets Problems Online

By Lily | Monday, January 23, 2012 | 4 Comments

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0013729e4abe0e8f647a2e China Tries (And Fails) To Fix Rail Tickets Problems Online

In 2010, I spent six months in Beijing battling the crowded mobs on the subway lines praying for a little space to breath on the central No. 1 red line. But that was nothing compared to when I wanted to travel to other parts of China. That was a whole different kind of battle – the buying rail tickets kind. Think about the lines at Disneyland or to get into a store at midnight on Black Friday, now make them longer, more crowded, more frenzied, more prone to pushing, shoving and cutting in line, and you’re getting towards the state of what it’s like to buy train tickets in China. It’s hard to understand because the U.S. has a crap-tastic railway system, but in China its the cheapest and easiest way to get from Point A to Point B. Virtually every Chinese person has a horror story about trying to get train tickets. And naturally, the train ticket buying situation is at its worst right around the Lunar New Year when the whole country takes a collective vacation to celebrate and more than 200 million people, the majority of them migrant workers, want to get home.

This year, China’s rail ministry tried to fix this whole ticket buying fiasco by creating a website to reserve tickets. Only it didn’t work. The volume on the site was so high that it crashed all the time (and by volume I mean that this is China and one day it got 1.4 billion hits) and the website occasionally charged people for tickets they didn’t get. Most of the people traveling long distances home for the new year are migrant workers and many of them don’t know how to use computers, let alone the internet. You can imagine that this might create problems – you can’t get your tickets on the site and you can’t get your tickets in person because they’re all sold-out from being on the internet. One worker, Huang Qinghong became a folk hero after he wrote a scathing note to the rail minister after his own personal difficulties trying to get tickets: “You guys sitting on couches in air-conditioned offices…and coming up with buying tickets online, have you ever considered our lives? Have you experienced the agony of buying tickets?” Luckily for Huang, the newspaper that picked up his story gifted him an airplane ticket home, but for others, the problems remain. Maybe the government learned its lesson from this debacle and will come up with an actual way to solve the ticket buying problem, I’m not terribly optimistic.

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http://tinabot.blogspot.com/ TinaTsai

holy hell. and I thought packed airplanes around Christmas was an irritation.
ellebee11

Is trains the only way to get home? What about bus services? They don’t have a Chinatown bus service like we do on the east coast? lol… You would think with such a demand, other transportation companies would get in – bus and air.
lilyvee

@ellebee11 Haha, oh I can’t even imagine if Fung Wah existed in China…. But to seriously answer, I imagine it’s about being pretty unable to compete cost-wise. From what I remember, there aren’t really long distance bus services. The slow trains are really cheap and pretty reliable so I imagine it’d be hard to beat when cheap not comfort is what you’re after – I wonder about maybe buses for between big cities, but even so, I bet it’d be hard to get going. And for air, even the state-sponsored ones have no chance to be cheaper (the flights are actually more than even the expensive high-speed rail between Beijing and Shanghai so you can imagine what kind of crazy things they’d have to do to get the tickets to cost less than tickets for the cheapo slow-poke trains).
Blamster

Ouch, looks like despite all the infrastructure investments they’ve made they still need more! When I was in Beijing and Shanghai a couple of summers ago I didn’t have problems with getting tickets or getting on the train but I had a hard time getting into the station because there were too many people for the entrances/exits.

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