Railway Ministry: the identification system for train ticket may cause serious traffic jam

The Railway Ministry held the second press conference for transport during the Spring Festival period on 15th Jan. 2009. Mr. Zhang Shuguang, who is Assistant Chief Engineer of the Railway Ministry and Secretary for Transport, introduced the forceful measures that being used to respond to the peak time for passenger transport.

He said, in the recent periods of transportation around the Spring Festival, the view of identification system for train ticket has been put forward, which means the ID card will be checked when passengers enter into the station. In my opinion, although the starting point of this view is positive, it would be necessary to consider if this is feasible through seriously research. I know that there are some transport departments have adopted the measure that using ID card buying tickets and checking in, in which the point of departure is on the safe side. However, it is still questionable that whether the railway transportation is qualified to carry out in the same way.

First of all, the transport capacity will not be strengthened after this system been adopted. At the moment, there is a big contradiction between transport capacity and freight volume, where the freight volume is far from enough. As a result, if that identification system had been accepted now, it would be no doubt that the work load of redundancy procedures will be increased. For example, there are over 280 trains at Beijing West Railway Station every day and two hundred thousand passengers at peak time. Besides, the train will be sent out every five minuets. Generally speaking, there are around 2000 passengers in one train, where only 30 minuets would be needed for the whole work of checking in. But if we add the procedure of checking the ID card to every passenger, assuming 2 seconds being cost per card, nearly another one hour will be raised for this process which originally been thought to be tense.

Secondly, the railway is the most common way of public transport. In the train station with limited volume, if we check the ID card in the mean time when people get into the station, it will result in a large assembly for parts of passengers. Not only a seriously block-up will happen at station square, booking office and entrance and exit area, many unsafe factors my bring out as well, such as stampede when the volume of passengers is large and the consequence is unbearable to recall.

Last but not least, it would be inconvenient to both passengers and station staffs. For instance, the booking-office clerks have to type the ID number and name into computer which means more amount of work. Therefore, the principle reason that we still not adopt this system is due to unsuccessful hardware, including construction of railway net, more advanced technology that could be used at buying tickets and check in procedure.

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the picture shows people waiting to buy the tickets -_-;