Fri, Jan 28, 2011 page8

• EDITORIAL: Lunar New Year travel

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  The beginning of Taiwan’s crazy travel week is just around the corner, and traffic officials and police nationwide are gearing up for record numbers of travelers to hit the road. Every year, a great number of motorists take advantage of the cancelation of tolls on the nation’s freeways to travel at odd hours — after midnight and before 7am this year — and hopefully avoid major congestion. However, it’s inevitable that the freeways are going to be packed going north and south, and especially going through the tunnels between Taipei and Yilan, on Wednesday and on Feb. 7.

  There are alternatives to driving — plane, train or bus. However, these choices are often just as difficult to navigate around this time of year as the parking lot-like freeways. Take the Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA) for example. The TRA only opened up purchasing of railway tickets for the Lunar New Year on Jan. 20 at 6am. By 6:05am, nearly all seats were sold out, and the TRA’s Web system nearly crashed with all the traffic it received. High-speed rail tickets are an alternative, but not if one is traveling to the east coast, and they’re also quite expensive. Then there’s flying, but plane tickets were all booked up pretty quickly as well.

  It’s often easier to get seats on a bus during the Lunar New Year, even though one has to jostle through crowds in the thousands at just about every bus station nationwide, but the main limitation of taking a bus is that they go right where most travelers don’t want to go — the congested freeways.

  So, if one is to try to avoid traffic jams, but can’t get a TRA rail ticket, a high-speed rail ticket or an airplane ticket, what is there to do?

  That’s the dilemma that people who want to travel face every year during the Lunar New Year. One simple alternative would be to stay put. People in Taipei can bump elbows with shoppers at the Dihua Street (迪化街) dried goods market. It’ll be crowded, however. A recent 104 Job Bank poll said that office workers were planning to spend about 27 percent of their expenditures on food during the week of the Lunar New Year holidays.

  With increasing numbers of travelers year by year, some families get together either before or after the Lunar New Year to forgo the nasty travel experience. This means that on the actual Lunar New Year holiday, some people can skip the tradition of joining their families and can instead do whatever they want. The Ministry of Transportation and Communications is actively encouraging this, pleading with motorists to either travel before or after peak traffic periods.

  And for those who feel travel is a must during the holiday, but don’t want to deal with the huge crowds at bus or rail stations or fight for space on the freeways, there’s a fun and healthy alternative — bicycles. Ten years ago, it was almost unheard of to see Taiwanese cycling up and down the east coast, or across the cross-island highways. But these days, one can hardly go a single kilometer without running into another cyclist who is pedaling “round the island.”

  During the holiday next week, there will be many choices of entertainment and many places to go, as well as the endless family get-togethers and the tonnes of food that will be consumed. Travel will be hectic, but there are alternatives for those who just can’t face the traffic. All in all, transportation officials are right. If you can find a way to avoid peak traffic, do so. But if not, have fun anyway, drive safely and have a happy Lunar New Year.
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