From Chinese Press

Passengers' interest comes first

(China Daily)
Updated: 2011-03-01 09:21

According to media reports, the Ministry of Railways' debts will peak in 2014. To overcome the impending shortage of funds, the ministry will tap into new sources of finance that will probably hurt ordinary passengers further, says an article in zhnews.net. Excerpts:

The National Audit Office report shows that the Ministry of Railways' liability was 1.3 trillion yuan ($197.7 billion) by the end of 2009.

Going by the ministry's data, we find that it spent 606.7 billion yuan on infrastructure in the first 11 months of 2010 but earned only 412 billion yuan in return, which indicates a significant imbalance.

Despite being burdened by such a huge debt, the ministry is far from relaxing its pace of building high-speed railways.

The ministry recently restricted the number of tickets to be issued for some ordinary trains. In fact, during Spring Festival, the last travel peak season, migrant workers found it difficult to get tickets to travel on ordinary trains, while prices of high-speed train tickets kept rising.

This has made many to speculate that the ministry reduced the number of tickets for ordinary trains so that passengers would be forced to travel on faster or high-speed trains and help the railways make more profit.

We can only hope that the speculation is wrong. Building a high-speed railway network across the country calls for huge investments and would take the ministry years to earn back the money.

More importantly, the original idea of developing such a network is to make travel more convenient for passengers.

Therefore, depriving ordinary passengers of the choice to travel on normal trains and raising the prices of high-speed train tickets go against the original intention of the railways and passengers' interest.