Illustration: Liu Rui

It's the busiest time of a year again for the country's transport system. The Chinese New Year is just over two weeks away.

Railways still remain the cheapest option for most people to get home. More than 5 million people traveled by train last Friday, according to the MOR. The tide of people on the move will only surge as the year of the dragon draws near.

Online booking service is made more widely available by the railway authorities, along with telephone booking. People do not have to go all the way to the railway stations, queuing up for several days and nights to get a ticket.

But the new ticket services have become the center of a storm of complaints. The official website was jammed, and some people made payment online but didn't get their tickets, and the phone line was constantly blocked.

The complaints were not pointless.

The railway authorities somehow didn't anticipate that the website could be paralyzed when millions of people logged on at the same time, a basic fact known to any systems administrator. And the phone bank could be enlarged to handle more calls.

But it is also irresponsible for some to blame the new services as useless, and as just the result of the whim of railway officials who only sit in their office and don't care about the large number of migrant workers who either don't know how to use online services or don't have a computer at all.

New technology or services are introduced to provide more convenience and improve efficiency. Often the birth is imperfect, and the systems need some time to be improved and optimized. But we don't abandon new things just because someone misses the equal troubles people faced during the Stone Age.

Actually the online and telephone booking services are a real step forward, following a long period of public clamor for their introduction. But public interests are often self-contradictory. When tickets were hard to come by and scalpers ran rampant, people asked why we couldn't require personal ID for each ticket, as with the airline ticket system.

When ticket windows were surrounded by seas of desperate people waiting for their turn, some questioned why we couldn't keep up with the times and introduce an online booking service.

Now when the railway authorities have answered the calls, many complain about the inconvenience the ID check causes, and the "inequality" the online service has caused because of the technology and wealth gap between poor migrant workers and Internet-savvy urban dwellers.

At a time when blasting authorities in the name of seeking the justice for the "disadvantaged" has become trendy, it's interesting to discover that public opinion doesn't really blindly follow those who deem themselves opinion leaders.

When some well-known blog writers left messages on Weibo saying "Damn the Ministry of Railways for ignoring the migrant workers," many followed with opposing comments.

The introduction of online and telephone booking services only provide more options to buy train tickets, some said. Traditional options such as windows at the railway station or the thousands of licensed booths in big cities like Beijing are still available. People can choose whatever means they like to buy a ticket. And old or young, rich or poor, can easily find a phone to call in, and the chances are equal for every caller.

According to the MOR, more than 6 million tickets were sold last Friday, and 33.7 percent went through online or telephone system.

It is not a matter of whether we need these new services, but how to make them work better as additional options.

Just like the bullet trains following the fatal Wenzhou crash last year, the new services will be fine-tuned, but will not be dropped.

There'll never be room enough for everyone to get home at chunyun. But at least people will have more ways to try.

The author is an editor with the Global Times. wugang@globaltimes.com.cn.

counterpoint: Railway ministry fails to grasp scope of chunyun chaos