Extinguishing the light at the end of the tunnel

Last week, after returning to Beijing from my vacation (chronicled here in pictures, but perhaps never to be typed up in the blog), I was ecstatic to discover that in addition to opening a new subway line, the price of tickets had actually been lowered, from 3RMB to 2. I was gleeful, to say the least.

My glee was poorly thought out, as such emotions tend to be. In addition to the new line servicing its own area, it brought a huge increase to the number of people transferring to and riding the 2 existing lines. A China Daily article quotes city officials who say that the passenger volume has increased by 46% since the opening of the new line, "an immediate positive impact." Of course this increase in passenger load has made morning commutes almost unbearable, and even Sunday afternoon rides unpalatable.

The city announced earlier in the year that it will bring 264 new subway cars into service and cut waiting times for every line in order to make public transit more comfortable and appealing. They also seem to recognize that more lines are needed to make the subway a good choice for most commuters. They plan 4 more lines by 2010, bringing the total to 7, and a total of 19 lines covering 560 km by 2020, making the network the largest in the world. Of course, reducing the fare by 33% means reducing their revenues by nearly the same amount, costing the government an estimated $130 million a year on top of existing subsidies.

Meanwhile, as long as the experience underground is miserable and crowded, more people will be driven towards the great Chinese dream of the decade- car ownership. People who can afford a car are not going to be won over by a 1RMB price decrease. Cars are partly status symbols, but they're also (delusionally) perceived as convenient and comfortable compared to other forms of transportation in the city. To paraphrase a poster in a Beijing expat message board commenting on the price drop, the city won't persuade a single driver to switch over, they lost a third of their revenue, and they made the subway a living hell. Brilliant.

I'm also going to steal a potential solution from that same forum thread and expand on it a little. Don't decrease the fare, increase it. Make it 10RMB a ride, a 400% increase from the new price, and a luxury experience. Provide a hot cup of soy milk and a fried dough stick in the morning, an evening paper on the way home, and make the ride comfortable. If they want to reduce pollution and improve traffic they need to bring rich people down out of their cars, not take poor people off of their bikes and out of the buses. It shouldn't be too hard a sell. Drivers sit in traffic that's getting worse by the day. Surely reading a newspaper in an air conditioned, well-appointed subway carriage as they're whisked to work is a better solution. The poor people were doing fine with their buses and their bikes until the cars arrived and tangled up traffic. A huge price increase doesn't seem to be helping the poor people, but I think in the grand scheme it is.