What actual changes has China's fifth nationwide train speed-raise launched a month ago brought to people's lives and the country's economy?
Running time of the trains operated between Guangzhou and other Chinese cities, especially cities in west China, has been remarkably reduced. For instance, the K356 express train from Guangzhou to southwest China's Chongqing has cut 12 hours and 31 minutes for a single run. The time needed for going from Guangzhou to Lanzhou in northwest China's Gansu Province and Kunming, capital city of Yunnan, reduced four hours in both cases.
According to the Guangzhou Railway Group, the shortened time of all the 459 trains under its administration totals 128 hours.
Speed increase promotes the market of passenger trains, especially on some newly opened routes. At present, the Guangzhou Railway Group sends 355,000 people off the city each day, 30,000 more than that before the speed-up. During the seven-day May Day holiday, the group transported 278,000 more people than the same period in 2002, a rise of 7 percent.
The Z17/18 express trains between Changsha and Beijing also received warm welcome and sold out over 90 percent of tickets in their primary driving.
According to the Ministry of Railway, 106,815 freight cars were unloaded on May 6, 2004, a record high, and 100,210 freight cars were loaded, an increase of 7.2 percent compared with May 6, 2003.
Obviously, the fifth train speed increase has eased the country's freight transportation bottleneck. With the national economy in a new phase of growth and costs of raw materials and transportation rising, the speed increase will help solve the problem.
With the train speed-up, it takes even less time for people to go from Guangzhou to the surrounding cities such as Huadu, Dongguan, Shenzhen and Foshan. It takes only half an hour to the former two, and an hour for the latter two. .
Convenient transportation will eventually change some people's daily life too. They may now choose to live in one city and work in another. If needed, it's possible to shuttle back and forth among several cities in a day.
(China.org.cn by Feng Yikun, May 23, 2004)
