1.4 million pieces of railway data witness the changes in china’s golden week travel
2024-09-30
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do you have any plans to travel this national day holiday? if so, should we take the high-speed rail or fly?
we know that there is an ongoing topic between these two means of transportation: why some people would rather take a 5-hour high-speed train than a 2-hour flight. and this also reflects the thinking of many people when traveling far away: choose high-speed rail within 5 hours, and choose airplane within 5 hours.
therefore, where you can go by taking the high-speed train in 5 hours has also affected many people's travel plans.the paper combed through the train schedule information on railway 12306 and sorted out the 5-hour high-speed rail "circle of friends" in 32 major cities, and combined with the "national railway passenger train timetable" in october 2002, to compare and observe the changes in travel modes in the past and present.
first of all, let’s take this national day trip from beijing as an example: by taking a 5-hour high-speed train, you can reach 100 prefecture-level cities and 2 municipalities directly under the central government. this is a quite vast area, considering that there are only 297 prefecture-level cities in the country.
but during the national day golden week more than 20 years ago, by taking a five-hour train ride from beijing, you could at most reach anyang, a city in northern henan, where you could visit the yin ruins museum and learn about the story of the shang dynasty.
as for the current challenge of many social media bloggers to take the "high-speed train" from beijing to tianjin to buy breakfast and come back to eat, it was impossible to complete the cross-city trip in 21 minutes more than 20 years ago. at that time, the fastest morning train from beijing to tianjin, t531, departed at 8:05 and arrived at tianjin north station at 9:16. after going back and forth, no matter how authentic the pancakes are, they still taste bad.
"the sun in the past has become slower. cars, horses, and mails are all slower. there is only enough time to love one person in a lifetime," mu xin lamented in 1982 that the pace of life had become too fast. but let alone 1982, even 20 years later in 2002, judging from today’s travel pace, it seems like driving at a slower speed.
beijing is not the city with the most areas reached by the 5-hour high-speed train.
where can you get to by high-speed train in 5 hours from your city?
among the 4 municipalities, 27 provincial capitals and the hong kong special administrative region we have sorted out,zhengzhou can reach 123 cities directly in a 5-hour rail journey, making it the city with the widest "high-speed rail circle of friends" in the country.
as the first city in china to build a "rice-shaped" high-speed rail hub, zhengzhou is not only located at the intersection of two major arteries, "one vertical and one horizontal", the beijing-guangzhou railway and the longhai railway, it is also located in beijing, xuzhou, xi'an, wuhan and jinan. the center of the city is an important railway hub. it has zhengzhou east railway station with 16 stations and 32 lines and zhengzhou airport station with 16 stations and 32 lines.
this kind of railway network extending in all directions cannot be built overnight. in the initial stage of operation after zhengzhou east railway station opened in september 2012, there were only 34 trains per day and an average of only about 3,000 passengers per day. "in the early days of the opening of zhengzhou east railway station, there were more people visiting the station than passengers arriving by train." a relevant person from zhengzhou east railway station once told dahe daily.
in addition to beijing and zhengzhou, the number of "circles of friends" on the 5-hour high-speed rail in wuhan, changsha and hefei also exceeds 100.
the above statistical caliber only uses direct high-speed rail as the standard. if you are willing to consider transferring, then many cities can cover a wider area with 5 hours of rail travel.for example, zhengzhou can reach 136 cities, beijing 129, and wuhan 128 in 5 hours.
the picture below shows the 5-hour train coverage in 32 cities that incorporates the transfer plan. yellow is the departure point. the lighter the blue, the longer the ride time. cities with grid lines require transfers. reached the place within 5 hours.
among the 34 cities, hong kong is the city that has expanded its railway "circle of friends" the most through transfers. although only 28 cities can be reached by high-speed rail in 5 hours from xiangjiang, with the help of transfers at major stations such as guangzhou south railway station, the number of cities that can be reached by high-speed rail in 5 hours from hong kong has increased to 49.
from taking the green train for 5 hours to only reach a few cities, to now covering hundreds of cities, the biggest change brought about by this is that rail travel has become the first choice for many people.
when will railway travel become the main travel force during golden week?
in september 1999, the state council issued the revised "regulations on holidays for national festivals and memorial days", article 6 of which directly gave birth to the concept of the "national day golden week". the seven-day holiday directly triggered a boom in holiday tourism.
but what many people don't know is that during the golden week at that time, nearly 90% of trips were by road, and the number of passengers carried by railways per day was less than 4 million.
crowded, noisy and long, these are the memories of many people taking trains back then. in the book "chinese on the train" by photographer wang fuchun, we can still see some scenes of taking the train back then.
1995, wuhan-changsha. because the car was crowded, a passenger who had not bought a ticket lay down on the back of the seat. image source: "chinese on the train"
in fact, before the national railway began its sixth major speed increase in 2007, many railway lines were facing market squeeze from both highways and civil aviation.the choice to increase the train speed to 200-300 kilometers per hour allows the railway to show its advantages in medium-distance travel.
for example, starting from the center of shanghai to nanjing is a 300-kilometer journey. taking into account the impact of traffic jams, the road transportation time is about 4 hours; by plane, the round-trip journey to the airport plus waiting time makes shipping not optional. the non-stop high-speed trains at intermediate stations can control the travel time to within one hour. this is also the actual time it takes for the g8 and g10 trains on the beijing-shanghai line, which currently has the strongest train service, to travel between shanghai and nanjing.
according to the "statistical bulletin on the development of the transportation industry in 2023" released by the ministry of transport in june this year, railways carried a total of 3.855 billion passengers last year, with a turnover of 1,472.9 billion passenger-kilometers, and the average railway trip distance per person reached 382.1 kilometers. in 2004, before the sixth major speed increase, the average distance people traveled by train each time was 511.1 kilometers. at that time, taking the train basically meant traveling far away, and the proportion of short- and medium-distance trips was far less than it is now.
therefore,the number of daily railway passengers during the national day golden week has also increased from more than 3 million passengers in 2002 to 17.64 million passengers in 2023.
in addition, according to calculations based on data obtained by cctv news from the ministry of transport, railways accounted for 30.8% of the total number of tourists sent by various means of transportation across the country during the mid-autumn festival and national day holiday last year.
considering that many people, in addition to railways, will also choose short-distance road trips many times during their travels, this means that during the national day, there are already quite a few people who rely on high-speed rail and other railways for travel. this also explains from the side why train tickets during the golden week are becoming more and more difficult to grab. so many people lamented that "high-speed rail tickets are harder to get than concert tickets."
behind the expansion of the high-speed rail’s “circle of friends” is not just because of the speed
when comparing the same railway travel times in the starting and ending cities in 2002 and 2024, we found that,the minimum travel time on most lines has been reduced by 60%, which is basically in line with the speed increase from green trains to high-speed rails - the overall speed has increased from 100 kilometers per hour to at least 200 kilometers per hour.
for example, from beijing to shanghai, the fastest speed of the green train is 15 hours and 35 minutes (t31 train), and the "fuxing" high-speed rail now takes 4 hours and 18 minutes (g21 train). the journey time has been compressed. 69.1%.
however, the travel time between some cities has been reduced by more than 70% or even 80%. this can not only be achieved by increasing the speed.
for example, the fastest travel time from nanchang to jingdezhen has been reduced from 4 hours and 21 minutes to just 42 minutes because the new train does not stop at one stop. although the average train stay time at ordinary stations is 2-4 minutes, the time added by stopping at one station is not just that much. taking the traction locomotive used in traditional green locomotives as an example, it takes time to decelerate and increase speed. it takes 10 minutes to stop and another 10 minutes to increase the speed to 100 kilometers per hour.
therefore, from the fifth major speed increase in 2004 to the sixth major speed increase in 2007, a large number of fourth- and fifth-class stations disappeared across the country.
according to a report by china news weekly, the shenyang railway bureau alone canceled more than 130 stations during the fifth major speed increase, and thousands across the country. at that time, the disappearance of a large number of county-level stations affected the travel of many residents. it took several years for the problems to be gradually resolved.
in addition to faster trains and non-stop trains at small stations, the increasingly dense high-speed rail network has also shortened the travel time between cities.
for example, the shanghai-suzhou-tongren railway opened in 2020 has finally provided a direct high-speed rail between shanghai and yangzhou, compressing the travel time to more than one and a half hours. before that, direct lines were opened between shanghai and yangzhou. however, due to the limited railway lines across the river at that time, the train from shanghai to yangzhou had to detour through nanjing to cross the river first, and then detour to yangzhou. the entire journey took more than 5 hours. , longer than the more than 3 hours by bus. therefore, insiders told the yangtze evening news that this train ceased operation around 2011.
so, during the national day golden week this year, have you grabbed high-speed rail tickets?
the paper reporter chen liangxian, wang yasai and wei yao
(this article is from the paper. for more original information, please download the “the paper” app)