Daily Cap On High-speed Rail Tickets Lifted To 20,000

The cap on tickets for the high-speed rail line will rise by 6,000 from Wednesday, to 20,000 per day.

It will be the second increase in the quota this week, with an extra 4,000 tickets per day added from Monday.

In a social media post on Tuesday, the Transport and Logistics Bureau said it was happy to announce the quota is rising again after discussions with mainland authorities, adding that there is a high demand for tickets ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday.

North-bound tickets had been sold out for several days.

Lawmaker and former MTR engineer Gary Zhang said the authorities were being too conservative with ticket sales and the capacity of the trains should serve as the cap as cross-border travel picks up again.

If there was a need to limit capacity, he told RTHK's Hong Kong Today programme on Wednesday, this could be achieved by adjusting the frequency of trains.

"First of all, all the tickets are sold in a real-name system," he told RTHK's Vicky Wong. "So under the current train timetable, there is naturally a limit. For example, we have 39 trains [daily] to Shenzhen and Guangzhou; the capacity of each train is around 600 people, so naturally we already have a 20,000-passenger capacity for each day."

High-speed services to Guangzhou restarted on Sunday after a three-year break due to the pandemic.

_____________________________