With Chinese New Year just a week away, people are on the move. As anyone who has witnessed the ghost town that is Nanjing for this week long holiday will testify, approximately two thirds of the population of Nanjing, 5.3 million give or take, are set to disappear, either headed home, accompanying one who is headed home, or just looking for a break.
Five million people is a lot to move out of a city in just a week. So how on Earth is it done? Let’s do the math.
People headed home by car are mostly going to be doing so along one of the giant highways that connect our fair city with the rest of the country. However, wherever they are headed, off to Chengdu on the mighty G42 for example, they first need tackle the inner ring road.
Nanjing’s inner ring road is approximately 120 km long, Assuming gridlock; i.e. one car every six metres, four lanes, 1.5 people per car (and that might be generous since many migrant workers toil away alone in Nanjing); we calculate 120,000 people, but they’re sitting doing nothing. Let’s now put them on the move. Assuming 60 km/h and the cars are now each 60 metres apart (yeah, right), that’s 6,000 people flowing through the ring road per hour, or 144,000 per day. Do not forget the road flows in two directions; 288,000 per day. In a week, two million.
Hang on. There are hardly a million cars in Nanjing, and there will be plenty left behind sitting parked while their owners snack and chat the holiday away. Not to mention that even at Spring Festival, the roads in the middle of the night will be fairly quiet. A figure of one million is more likely.
Now, what else is on the roads? Buses. Nanjing has five main bus stations which run approximately 100 buses per day each. Assuming 50 people on a bus, that makes a paltry total of 175,000 for the week.
Flights? They are hardly worth calculating but let’s assume the number is in the same region as the buses.
Hmmm, so far we have only managed to move 1.35 million people out of the city; we’re a long way off our target of 5 million. Better hop on a train. Ever the efficient people mover, that is how the majority make their annual pilgrimage home.
Starting with Nanjing South, the biggest railway station in Asia manages to dispatch an incredible 394 long, slender bullets each day. No old fashioned K class slow trains for Nanjing South; it’s high speed “gao tie” all the way. Approximately half are of the eight coach formation and the other half a double unit of 16 coaches. Each sits 75 or thereabouts. Therefore each train averages 900 people. For the week our total is 2,482,000. That’s more like it!
Nanjing Railway station, on the other hand, has 251 departures a day comprising a mix of new modern G class high speed trains along with a variety of older D and K class slow trains. Some of these can pack in well over 1,000 people but we will take that as an average for each train. So that gives us 1,757,000 for the week.
Two additional factors are at play here however; first there is the fact that many trains will carry a lot more people than for whom they have seats. Standing room all the way for this lot. Then, we should remember that the majority of people departing Nanjing head home in a north, south or west direction; a lot of trains from Nanjing South in particular are Shanghai bound and this correspondent had no trouble at all securing tickets on Friday for travel to Shanghai tomorrow, 1st February.
Time for our final large assumption; that these two factors cancel each other out.
Our grand total for the week is the 5,589,000; pretty close to the target of 5.3 million we set ourselves. So if you have ever wondered why people can get off work a week before the actual holiday starts, now you have your answer. Because that’s how long it takes to evacuate five million people from Nanjing.
