HONGKOU Stadium has never seen such crowds. In recent days, thousands upon thousands of people have been lining up outside and inside the stadium, waiting to buy train tickets to travel home to their families for the lunar New Year Eve.

The stadium, located on Dongtiyuhui Lu in the Hongkou District, was selected to serve as a temporary ticket market for this year¡¯s festival transportation peak, which began January 25 and runs until March 5. Since January 20, long lines have snaked around the site every day, according to one resident living near the stadium.

To meet the huge demand, the stadium has opened 40 ticket windows, from which more than 20,000 train tickets are sold every day.

Despite these efforts, after the ticket office closes at 6 pm, around 3,000 people are still left without tickets, forced to wait over-night for next day¡¯s ticket sales, according to a report in the Oriental Morning Post.

¡°It is always a headache to me. Buying a ticket before the Spring Festival is so difficult!?said Tong Xing, from Huainan of East China¡¯s Anhui Province. ¡°You need to queue up for a whole day, and even that doesn¡¯t guarantee you will be able to buy a ticket.?

Chen Min, who works for a local IT company, said about half of the ticket reservations sought by her company this year were not fulfilled. ¡°Anyone who fails to get a ticket before New Year¡¯s Eve has no choice but to take the train on New Year¡¯s Day.?

Too few trains

¡°The unsatisfactory level of railway capacity is definitely the key to the annual problem of Spring Festival transportation,?said Yang Lifeng, an engineer with the Shanghai City Comprehensive Transportation Planning Institute.

Official figures show the country has only just over 70,000-kilometres of rail track.

Although in recent years, China has added over 1,000 kilometres of railway track every year, the total length still only accounts for 6 per cent of the world¡¯s total. This comparatively modest system creaks under the burden of carrying roughly a quarter of the world¡¯s rail traffic.

The shortage of railway capacity becomes most obvious during the Spring Festival. This period is, according to Chinese tradition, a time for family gatherings, when people should all head back to their hometowns for New Year¡¯s Eve. Since it is relatively cheap and fast, rail transport is the first choice for ordinary people when planning these journey¡¯s.

Hu Yadong, deputy president of the Ministry of Railways, said at a press conference on January 25 that the country¡¯s rail system was able to accommodate greater numbers of passengers than ever before this year. He confessed, however, that the situation was still ¡°very tense?

This year, the railways will be able to carry 2.74 million passengers daily during the 40-day spring festival period. But the actual number of passengers, as estimated by experts, could exceed this capacity by almost 900,000.

People pressure

¡°The increasing size of the ¡®floating?population adds to the transportation difficulties,?said Zhou Haiwang, deputy president of the Institute of Population & Development Studies at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. According to his estimate, about half of those using the railway are migrant workers.

¡°China has been undergoing rapid urbanization for a decade,?Zhou said. The proportion of the total population classified as ¡°urban?(living in a city for at least six months each year) was increasing by 1 per cent every year.

Last year¡¯s statistics showed 40 per cent of Chinese are now urban residents. This figure is expected to reach 60 per cent by the end of 2020.

¡°In the period up to 2020, about 300 million farmers will move into cities, a number exceeding the entire population of the US,?Zhou said. ¡°Transportation systems will be placed under even heavier pressure.?

Due to unbalanced development, most migrants tend to concentrate in the large, prosperous cities in coastal provinces.

¡°The population itself does not lie at the root of the problem. The key is correct administration,?Zhou said.

¡°Presently, most cities have policies designed to dissuade floating people from settling. Migrant people face discrimination in respect to registering for residence, employment, social security and medical services, leading to continual population churning,?he added.

Funding shortage

¡°Given the huge pressure, I don¡¯t expect the transportation problem to be solved within the next two or three years,?Yang said. ¡°Railway construction requires enormous projects extended across large areas.?

The huge investment required is the first problem, according to Yang. The construction of railway lines depends on long-term government investment. ¡°But the country¡¯s annual investment in railways, amounting to about 50 billion yuan (US$6 billion), is utterly inadequate considering the scale of the problem,?commented the Beijing Evening News.

¡°China should encourage more non-government investment in railway construction, in order to make up the funding shortfall,?Yang said.

Yang thought high-speed railways would eventually become dominant in the Yangtze Delta, where the economy is highly developed.