Why did the price of Spring Festival tickets go up?

Spring transportation

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Spring Festival is a large-scale phenomenon of high transportation stress that occurs in mainland China around the time of the Lunar New Year. Passenger traffic during the Spring Festival is very high, and for the past decade, the annual passenger traffic of the Spring Festival has exceeded the total population of the mainland by more than one billion. Spring Festival Transportation usually occurs about 15 days before and 25 days after the Chinese New Year Festival, making it about 40 days of Spring Festival Transportation each year. In the general sense, Spring Festival refers to intercity transportation in mainland China, excluding chartered flights for Taiwan residents for the Spring Festival, transportation between mainland China and Hong Kong and Macau, and international transportation. The colloquial term Spring Festival has two meanings: it refers to the transportation phenomenon around the Spring Festival, and it is an abbreviation for the period of Spring Festival. The scale of the Spring Festival is so large that it is difficult for mainland China's transportation to cope with it. In order to solve the Spring Festival problem, the Chinese government deploys in advance every year, but it is still unable to meet the requirements of the Spring Festival. For example, for the 1995 Spring Festival, the State Council of the People's Republic of China*** and the State Council of the People's Republic of China had stipulated that the units using migrant laborers should leave no less than 60% of them in the local area for the festival; the regions importing migrant laborers should suspend the recruitment of new migrant laborers from outside the country for a month after the Spring Festival, etc., but it still could not alleviate the pressure of the Spring Festival and the social problems it brought about.

Contents [hidden]

1 Causes of the Spring Festival

2 Characteristics of transportation during the Spring Festival

3 Problems related to the Spring Festival

4 Ticket purchasing methods

5 Areas with more prominent transportation pressure

6 Spring Festival statistics

7 External links

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Causes of the Spring Festival

The Spring Festival arises mainly from traditional Chinese attitudes and the large movement of manpower in society. Most Chinese people believe that the Spring Festival is the most important festival of the year, the beginning of the year, and no matter how far away from their families, they should try to reunite with them on New Year's Eve to **** off the New Year. Since the reform and opening up of China, the Chinese government has started to encourage self-employment and restrictions on the movement of people have begun to loosen. As a result a very large number of people have moved from less economically developed areas to more economically developed areas for employment, resulting in a massive movement of manpower. These people who left their homes to go abroad for employment concentrated around the Spring Festival to return home for the New Year, i.e., they became the main crowd of the Spring Festival transportation.

In addition, since most schools take a winter vacation two to three weeks before the Spring Festival and start school around the 15th day of the first month, the return of students studying abroad also constitutes another major group of people in spring transportation.

Another reason why the Spring Festival occurs is that the established intercity transportation network can no longer fully meet the demand for transportation. For this reason, the Chinese government has also formulated plans such as the Medium- and Long-Term Railway Network Plan to alleviate the lack of capacity.

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Traffic characteristics during the Spring Festival

The pressure on intercity traffic increased dramatically, and there was no significant change in urban and international traffic.

Traffic pressure is mainly concentrated in land transportation; aviation also has some pressure, but the pressure growth is limited due to price and safety constraints; river and sea transportation have very limited pressure growth due to transportation capacity and safety.

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Problems associated with spring transportation

The spring transportation, although it can satisfy the requirements of some people to go home, after all, it can not satisfy the needs of all people, therefore, there are other problems accompanying the process of spring transportation.

Price: During the Spring Festival, the price of airplane, bus and train tickets rose almost across the board. Some people believe that the rise in ticket prices during the Spring Festival is due to the oversupply caused by a period of time, in line with the laws of the market, is understandable. Those who hold an opposing view believe that the rise in airplane and train ticket prices is related to the monopolization of the industry. Especially the railroad, in the vast majority of routes are only one enterprise in operation, in the off-season and did not reduce prices, indicating that the train tickets are not at all according to market changes, so the price increases during the Spring Festival should be regarded as a kind of monopoly behavior. And many people also believe that the increase in rail and road fares for the Spring Festival will have a greater impact on people with lower incomes, as it is basically impossible for them to choose to fly, and the inability to return home for the Spring Festival year after year may create some other social problems.

Yellow-cow: Yellow-cow is the common name given to ticket sellers, people who specialize in selling purchased tickets at a markup and making a profit. Groups of these people are called scalpers. Scalpers generally obtain a large number of tickets at one time through special social connections or by hiring a large number of people to make phone calls, stand in line, etc., and hoard them and sell them at a higher price, exacerbating the contradiction between supply and demand in the Spring Festival. In addition to scalpers who sell genuine tickets, there are also unscrupulous people who forge tickets for sale, and they often make and sell counterfeits by altering expired tickets and making their own tickets. Those who have purchased counterfeit tickets are often found by ticket inspectors at the time of ticket inspection, thus affecting their journeys and incurring losses. Many counterfeit tickets can be detected by the general public upon close inspection. As scalping has become more and more prevalent in recent years, the Chinese government has taken note of this behavior and has explicitly cracked down on it. But scalping has not been effectively curbed due to practical difficulties and rumors of collusion between law enforcement officials and scalpers.

Security: During the Spring Festival, there is a high density of people and relatively more crimes such as theft, robbery and fraud than usual. For travelers to carry goods, the inspection is often more stringent than usual, strictly prohibited to carry flammable and explosive and other dangerous goods on board, boarding. In terms of transportation safety, it is generally believed that rail transportation is a safer way, but many trains are overloaded. As for road transportation, many passenger transport enterprises in order to earn more money in the Spring Festival, often take more pull fast, long time operation, so that the driver is often at work in a state of fatigue, prone to car accidents. In addition, there are also vehicles that are overloaded with passengers, thus creating traffic hazards. Therefore, in recent years, the government has also begun to make efforts to rectify the problems of fatigue driving and overloading during the Spring Festival. To prevent air crashes, the Chinese government banned red-eye flights during the Spring Festival.

Transportation disputes: Transportation pressure is high during the Spring Festival, with delays and other situations occurring from time to time. Airplane delays, according to general procedures, need to notify travelers and offer appropriate solutions or even compensation. But the train, in 2005 and before the Spring Festival, there is no corresponding provisions. 2006 Spring Festival, will be in accordance with the provisions of the September 2005 Chinese People's **** and the State Ministry of Railways issued a "passenger train late notification" of the system, the requirements of the train is late for more than half an hour, the station and the train have to notify travelers of the reasons for the delay and the situation, and at the same time to the travelers to apologize.

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Ticketing methods

The usual methods of purchasing tickets during the Spring Festival continued to be implemented, but the way in which the railroads booked tickets changed considerably. Advance booking is adopted in most areas, but the specific programs vary from place to place. The railroads have adopted campus pre-sale of student tickets especially for colleges and universities, and group booking for factories and companies with a high concentration of labor. Others generally book tickets by phone and online, and only a relatively small number of tickets are reserved at train station ticket windows. The restriction on future travel dates for tickets that can be booked during the Spring Festival is also longer than usual. For example, in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, train tickets are booked for ten days instead of four days. Although telephone booking can eliminate the laborious queuing, the lines enabled by the booking telephone are far from adequate to meet the booking requirements. For example, during the 2005 Spring Festival, at the peak of the Shenzhen region, the number of passengers calling the telephone booking line exceeded 2 million per hour, while in the Guangzhou region, at the peak of the Spring Festival on February 1, the number of passengers reached 19.91 million. From January 16, 2005 to February 7, 2005, passengers in Shenzhen successfully booked 465,000 train tickets through telephone booking, with a daily average of 31,000 tickets booked by telephone, and 82% of the passengers obtained their train tickets through telephone booking. In other words, just by the numbers, all the train tickets that can be booked by phone from Shenzhen during the 23 days of the Spring Festival took less than 14 minutes to be booked out during the peak period of phone booking.

Ticketing for the spring festival has also been centralized at designated locations, but this has caused major traffic and safety problems in the vicinity, as well as failing to meet booking requirements, so fewer and fewer places are now selling tickets this way.

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Areas with more prominent transportation pressure

The areas with higher transportation pressure during the Spring Festival vary around the Spring Festival. Before the Spring Festival are areas with more manpower input, while after the Spring Festival are areas with more manpower output. The areas of higher pressure also include the more important transportation hubs and stations. Generally the pre-Chinese New Year pressure focuses on Guangdong, Beijing and Shanghai, while the post-Chinese New Year pressure focuses on Chengdu, Chongqing, Wuhan, Nanchang and Fuyang.

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Spring Festival statistics

This table has been recorded since 1994 and does not mean that the Spring Festival began in 1994.

Year Total passenger traffic during the Spring Festival (billion passengers) Railway passenger traffic (billion passengers) Highway passenger traffic (billion passengers) Water transport passenger traffic (million passengers) Civil aviation passenger traffic (million passengers)

1994 12.2

1995 14.28

1996 16.2

1997 17.4

1998 18.2

1999 14.4

2000 16.16

2001 January 9~February 17 16.6

2002 17.4 1.3 15.86 2430 725

2003 18.19 1.3 16.56 2400 870

2004 18.9 1.37 17.17 2600 1050

2005 January 25~March 5