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Good news for train passengers

(China Daily)
Updated: 2011-01-04 08:09

Luxury soft sleepers on four out of the five bullet trains on the Shanghai-Beijing route have been canceled. And they will be withdrawn from the fifth train early this year. This is good news for ordinary passengers before Spring Festival, says an article on cnhubei.com. Excerpts:

Tickets for a luxury soft sleeper on a bullet train on the Shanghai-Beijing route costs between 1,300 yuan and 1,470 yuan ($197 and $223), an amount most passengers cannot afford to pay.

With Spring Festival just a month away, many passengers, as usual, are finding it difficult to book train tickets at railway counters and fall into scalpers' traps.

The conversion of soft sleepers into ordinary sleepers is a great help for ordinary passengers, for they make travel less expensive for them. The cancellation of luxury seats and berths on bullet trains will especially help students and migrant workers travel to their destinations for Spring Festival.

Of course, some luxury seats and berths should be retained for high-end passengers, but their numbers should be relatively low.

After all, most people in the country still cannot afford to pay for luxury seats or berths because unlike the West, China is still a developing economy.

Until China reaches an advanced stage of economic development in the true sense of the term, tickets for public transport should strike a healthy balance among safety, price, speed and comfort.