Originally Posted by
jamar
I REALLY hope they don't put the real-name system into place on the really short runs. Stupid as it sounds, I live near Shanghai West station and sometimes use a G train to get downtown in a hurry (I wish they'd run trains on Line 11 more often; really, if I could be guaranteed that I could be on a train within 2-3 minutes of entering the station there wouldn't be any real advantage). Once I also took the only daily train that stops at Hongqiao and Shanghai West to get home.
Nobody ever called me normal...
I agree. There might be a purpose in real-name ticketing for the longer hauls, but I can't see any benefit for anybody in doing it for the shorter G routes. The only reason for going to real-name is to prevent scalping, but I didn't think that was much of a problem on the short G routes anyway. It's much more of an issue with the sleepers on Z, D, T, K trains, and all tickets around holiday time. Frankly, the primary resolution of the scalping/ huangniu problem is to
a) Eliminate the corrupt Railway employees that are the key suppliers of all the tickets, and who cause a big part of the "shortage" by making inventory disappear; and
b) Eliminate blocking/reserving of "just in case" tickets for the big state owned enterprises and ministries.