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Q: About Chinese transport during Spring Festival.
Transport during Spring Festival is a disaster to we Chinese, especially for people in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. To buy a ticket is the arduous task of everyone who hopes to stay together during the holiday with there family. It is said the tickets can be sold out in 20 seconds as soon as it starts selling. Do you guys have difficulty in buying tickets now? Do you have similar experience in your homeland?
11 years 13 weeks ago in Transport & Travel - China
It's hard to buy tickets around Christmas time in Europe. But it's nothing compared with China.
In the UK it is unusual for the whole nation to have a major vacation at the same time and if we do, (e,g, Christmas) we are talking about 5 million or so people travelling, not 700 million!
If China doesn't stagger it's holidays it will never improve, no public transport system could hope to cope with the numbers China is talking about.
Scandinavian:
agreed, staggered holiday would be an excellent way of dealing with the horror of transporting millions of people in very few days.
One thing is, whenever I have been using the high speed trains "off season" there are may empty seats, so increasing the capacity would just increase expenses (ticket prices) year round to let people travel in comfort those couple of days.
more controversially, the real answer probably lies in reforming the houku system. This is what generates the vast majority of travel. All the migrant workers are traveling in the same direction. If people where free to live and work as they pleased, spring festival travel would be in all directions.
Eric-Lee:
It i s not practical to stagger the holidays like Spring Festival. All people wanna stay together with their family. Just like the Xmas Day in your country.
I had my Chinese friend purchase my train tickets online a few days ago and I am leaving just before Spring Festival starts. I think that helps beat the possibility of disappointment. The previous answers are also correct but I would like to add that in our country you can plan your holidays well in advance and trains, buses and planes don't give you a 12 or 20 day window in which you must buy your tickets. It's that Chinese 'rush' that is mind boggling and actually quite ridiculous!
240 million people wanting to travel over the same period is impossible to imagine but if you want to see just how badly it works watch the movie "Last Train Home".
Hugh is right - people should be allowed to go on holidays right throughout the year.
Last year I didn't have any trouble buying train tickets for Spring Festival. The queue at the local ticket office wasn't that long....maybe 10 people. Of course this is in a small city...not sure if you'd call it 3rd or 4th tier, and we we're traveling from one small station to another within the same province using the high speed D-train (it seems the slower, less expensive trains are more popular amongst migrant workers).
In my home country (USA), the main travel holidays are Thanksgiving and Christmas. Sometimes airline tickets will be short in supply, but even then, most people have cars so they can drive if need be (which most people will opt to do in the first place). So this just ends up in creating more traffic on the highways....although nothing like what happens in China when they wave the tolls on their expressways during the holiday 
Have only one spring festival under the belt so far. Last year the ticket purchase was done using the phone ordering system, we needed tickets from Guangzhou to Changsha. As far as I remember my wife dialed the ticket office just short of 100 times to get through and purchase tickets.
This year she ordered tickets online without any issues, the web site worked just fine.
My home country has less people than many Chinese cities, the population density is low, the only time where there are bottlenecks will be on December 22nd where most peoples xmas holiday starts. Train tickets will be sold out and there will be a lot of traffic on the highways. A thing though. ticket sales start 3 months before, not 10 days like in China.
