Sunday, June 5, 2011

bulllet train

Was I doing a "Fast-pass matching" in Convesant term looking at the heading from Bl00M beeeerg news online article: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-02/beijing-shanghai-bullet-train-targets-flyers-fed-up-with-delays.html   I would say, "Yes, I did".  What the term "Fast-pass matching" is to form your opinion about a person or a thing in less than 5 seconds even though you might not know the whole story.  This attitude causes conflict and potential of creating value.  

In this instance, this article, I am not sure I failed per se.  The article editor seems to be a Westerner living in Asia, I think he is based in HKG.  

Anyway, what I saw was a cursory reporting and lack insights.  Maybe because the article is only related to finance hence other "issues" are not of concern.  Ah.. I see how I am moving up in the Conversation Meter now...  

Couple points I like to add to this article are:

IMHO, the speed slow down is not directly proportion to the affordability of the ticket for the public.  Rather, the party secretary in charge of the railroad was arrested for bribery associated to railroad expansion at the princely sum of 100 million RMB.  Immediately after that, the entire nation railroad network was under "safety check".  Preliminary said "ok".  The speed slow down could have been due to that.  Ripping the rail lines up and fix them properly?  Ummm.....  Vibration from passing trains can do a lot of shaking.  Overtime.......  you can draw the pictures.  So hurry come try the new train now!!!

Since the start of the new class of train, the schedules for "D" class and "T" class of services were slowly eliminated.  Migrant workers just cannot afford the new train ticket pricing.  To build a consensus, have to provide a "showing" of FOR the people.  

Started on June 1, everyone who buys a train ticket must show valid IDs.  23 types were endorsed.  Before, WE the Westerner just like everyone else here can just walk up and purchase ticket.  I was so amazed in March that we could just walked up to an automatic ticket boot and get bullet train tickets in less than 2 minutes.  No waiting time, no long lines, fast and convenient.  Then, being a suspicious A$$ H0   le that I was I wondered about flow tracking - the human kind.  It was a big hole.  Sure enough, we now have.  Everyone must carry ID and the tickets are printed like airline tickets here - name = ID number = photo.  Opppsss... I should not have think it out so loud.  On the surface, it was to fight ticket scalpers and fake tickets.  That was for sure, I agree but the bigger picture was "intelligent collection" ;-)   O right, for us Westerner we need to call in advance to book our tickets and then walk up to the ticket counters to pay and pick them up.  Convenient huh? 

Over the last few months, I see more of the tightening rather than relaxing.  On the surface, there were some forms of that but underneath that layer, more restrictions.  This type of policy I can understand, a vast country with everyone on micro-blogging, mobile SMS messages and a still innocent thinking, someone needs to control the message flow.  I don't fault the policy.  This country is going through a transition culturally, technologically and morally.  Let see how things shake out.



 





 


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