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Holiday crowds, if kept in order, move along reasonably
It’s that time of year again, when hundreds of millions of Chinese hit the road for family unions during the Spring Festival, which falls next week this year. Cars crawl, trains prostrate and crowds swell.
It took a friend of mine six hours to drive from Shanghai to his hometown Yangzhou on Tuesday afternoon. The trip usually takes three hours. Unsurprisingly, he was stuck in a traffic jam on the Beijing-Shanghai Highway, crammed with cars heading outside Shanghai for the most important family union in a year for the average Chinese.
How was the situation at railway stations? On my way to work yesterday morning, I stopped to check out the Hongqiao Railway Station, the new railway transportation hub of Shanghai, and found crowds of passengers standing in long, zigzag lines.
No chafing, no elbowing
But to my surprise, there was no chafing or elbowing, and foot traffic was relatively fast.
The railway station is so structured that most passengers who arrive by Metro will have to climb up two floors to reach the railway checkpoints. To prevent the checkpoints from being overcrowded, a couple of armed police stopped passengers at ground zero yesterday, allowing them to ascend the escalators only in groups. A few passengers were hot-tempered and tried to ignore police regulation, only to be blocked by the young policemen who were both strict and smiling.
Had there been no armed police around to keep order, the escalators would most likely have been paralyzed by the uncontrolled crowds, the way a highway was paralyzed by cars running wild.
Where there’s regulation, there’s speed and there’s security. By comparison, in a fast-food restaurant at ground zero of the railway station, quite a few patrons — many of whom were apparently train passengers — cut the lines and elbowed each other in order to be served first.
It takes time for crowds in China to behave well, but step by step, there’s progress. Setbacks are abundant, of course, but let’s take heart and salute the couple of young armed police who, with their smiles and skill, made thousands of passengers move — at a reasonably fast pace.
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