China's Spring Festival holiday crush is on again. Lines stretch back in the hundreds in Hefei, Shanghai, and everywhere else. There is a solution to this problem: variable scheduling.
When every student and employee in a country of 1.4 billion gets off at the same time, there is inevitably going to be a chaotic bottleneck, regardless of whether China's infrastructure is improved or not (personally, I think their railway system is fairly expansive when compared to, say, the United States).
Universities have the most leeway in shifting their vacation schedules: most schools are off for about a month at the holiday time, giving them a lot of flexibility on when to begin.
In the case of my present school, we are releasing for vacation one week before the Chinese New Year, the exact time when transit is going to be at its absolute apex. Bad idea.
On another note, employees need to be given vacation time outside of Spring Festival and (now lone) three-day National Day "Golden week." While there is of course an extraordinary significance to returning home on the New Year, the pressure would be less if employees had other chances to go home during the year.
Actually, I believe by law permanent employees are now supposed to be receiving paid vacation. This is a paper law and it will be interesting to see if, and when, it is put into practice.
On another note, the booking system in China clearly needs to be revamped. First, serious sting operations need to be put in place to rid scalpers from the holiday frenzy. Second, online booking needs to be introduced (and hopefully with more effectiveness than the hopelessly botched Olympic ticket sales).
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