Wentu丨Huang inspired
Editor丨Du Wenwen
At the end of the day, the drivers of the four bus lines in Shuangfeng County, Hunan Province collected their buses in the evening. The yellow-green 1 yuan bill was taken out of the coin box and stacked on a long table with a dark brown shine.
Zhu Qingji, the general manager of the bus company, was in charge of the inventory. He unfolded the folds on the cash, finished each yard, and wrote the corresponding amount in the revenue column of the day: On October 17, the highest income was No. 1 car, 147 yuan. No. 3 bus is dismal to single digits, 8 yuan. The total income of the 20 vehicles involved in the operation was 1,492 yuan a day.
This has been going on for two or three years. Zhu Qingji looked at the revenue records of the past week: most of them did not exceed 2,000 yuan in a single day. Except for the small peak brought by students after school on Friday, the highest is 3,897 yuan - but this is not enough to pay the average salary of more than 20 drivers of 180 yuan a day.
Mr. Zhu, 56, described his situation as a "nest," but he and his colleagues have used another way to grab attention. Just two months ago, Shuangfeng County and Sen City Bus Service *** hereinafter referred to as "Hesen Company"), publicly issued a suspension notice. The reason is that it is unable to support operations due to huge losses. Notices in white letters on a red background are posted next to the front doors of more than 20 buses, which shuttle through the streets of the county seat.
On September 19, Hesen Company posted a suspension announcement.
The outage of Hesen is not an isolated case. Stimulated by widespread subsidies in the past few years, the signal of the decline of the bus industry, which is hidden behind the boom, has been temporarily obscured. After 2019, the first financial subsidy for new energy buses stopped, and Hesen Company fell into a "huge policy loss".
Recently, bus companies including Hengshan, Hunan, Leiyang, and Dancheng, Henan have also experienced similar outages. The plummeting passenger flow and income are intertwined with complex reasons such as the disruption of subsidy policies, the diversification of travel modes and the impact of the epidemic.
On the day of the suspension notice in September, Shuangfeng County** intervened in communication and promised subsidies. In Twin Peaks, where there is no subway, buses carry most of the public travel for the elderly and students. In fact, buses in Twin Peaks County haven't really stopped running for a day.
But Zhu Qingji and his colleagues no longer have expectations for the future of the county's private buses. They can't get out of the operational predicament on their own, and their only hope is pinned on the first acquisition to take over.
At 4 o'clock in the afternoon on weekdays, it was raining lightly, and there were still a few minutes before the next bus departed, and the driver Chen Yuan lay on the steering wheel and brushed the short**.
He didn't wait for a single passenger, the doors closed and the car creaked into Fuxing Street, the county's busiest thoroughfare more than 20 years ago when buses first appeared in Shuangfeng.
There are many signboards on the façade on both sides, and the old houses behind them are some years old, some only have tiles on the front, and the red brick walls are exposed on the sides. The car continued to drive forward, surrounded by green mesh buildings under construction, which were once fifty or sixty-year-old farmers' markets.
Chen Yuan's home is on this street, he grew up here, and he is familiar with everything along the way, "this road has been the same for decades." Around 2008, after returning from a taxi drive in Qingyuan, Guangdong, he renovated his family's ancestral home into a small white five-story building. Now, the rent of the first floor has also dropped from 150,000 yuan to 80,000 yuan per year.
At 5 o'clock in the afternoon, the passengers on the bus gradually increased, and most of them were elderly people who were free of tickets. If it's a Friday or Sunday, the bus is mostly full of students. However, at the intersection where the three schools in the county are concentrated, buses cannot reach it because of the narrow roads. Every time after school, the private car that comes to pick up the children is jammed here.
HSBC Pedestrian Street, a former landmark of Shuangfeng and the first pedestrian street in the county, opened in 2015 and is now closed with most shops closed. The owner of a ** shop, which is in the process of liquidation, said that after the opening of the underground shopping street, many merchants moved over.
The underground commercial street is now one of the favorite places for young people in the county. But these bustles have nothing to do with Chen Yuan, the intersection between him and here is that in the two or three years of the construction of the commercial street, the No. 1 bus line with the largest passenger flow has been blocked.
Street view of Fuxing Street.
The trouble of driving a bus in the county is not limited to that. The terminal of the No. 1 bus is in front of the courtyard of a machine factory, and there is no other place to go, so you can only enter the factory and turn around. Sometimes a large stone will be placed at the factory gate, which must be close to the door to enter and exit. The people at the machine shop also complained that they had crushed the ground into potholes. Chen Yuan was a little unconvinced, "This place is going to close down, and we won't be allowed to enter." ”
The planning of public transportation in the county is not too perfect. Some of the two adjacent stops are about one or two hundred meters apart, and the bus stop signs are low and inconspicuous on the side of the road, and some are at the corner of the intersection, with a zebra crossing in front of them. There are also some stop signs with parking spaces painted in front of them, and no parking signs are erected.
Buses often pass all the way, passengers need to be informed in advance when they get off the bus, and it is not uncommon for buses to stop without stopping. An elderly lady waits in front of a stop sign not far from HSBC Walking Street. She had trouble with her legs and feet, and she had to go to the farmer's market to buy vegetables, which was not far away, and finally there was a car coming, but she waved but did not stop.
For driver Chen Yuan, his life clock is determined by the schedule, and he spends almost all of his time in the car except for lunch, rest, and vehicle recharge. Every day, he turns back 13 times on the 5-kilometre 1 one-way ride.
Chen Yuan feels that since the financial subsidy for electric buses has been interrupted, coupled with the decrease in passenger flow, it has become more and more difficult to make money.
Different from the current scene of Shuangfeng, the year 2007, when the company was established, was a period of vigorous economic development in the county.
Chen Yuan joined Hesen around 2010. Like his colleagues, most bus drivers started their careers in trucks and taxis, often working outside the home.
I used to drive a lot. Chen Yuan said that at that time, carrying passengers was like pulling soil on the construction site, one car after another, one person charged 1 yuan, one person could run seven or eight hundred a day, and the income of one day during the Spring Festival could reach more than 1,000 yuan, and there were endless people every day, and the interval between each car was not more than 5 minutes.
In the era when people were still Xi to shopping on the street, passengers from surrounding towns were also the main source of customers. They get off the bus with their front feet and get on the bus with their back feet and go to all corners of the county.
Huang Li, who has been in the clothing business on Fuxing Street for more than 10 years, said that at that time, the store's rent was hundreds of thousands of yuan a year, and the landlord was also strong, so if he couldn't pay the rent, he had to move out immediately, and there was no room for negotiation. At that time, the merchants in Shuangfeng County were doing brisk business, and the customers were generous, and the locals ridiculed that period, "saying that the consumption here is like Hong Kong." ”
One theory is that the high consumption at that time was related to the fraud and crime that was once flourishing in Shuangfeng County.
Beginning in the 90s of the last century, Shuangfeng began to prevalence of false testimony, and then evolved into more advanced SMS scams and PS scams. After Zhu Qingji was laid off and unemployed in the 90s, he once found a classmate in Shenzhen to find a job, but after he went, he found out that he was committing fraud. He refused. In less than a month, his classmate was arrested by **.
Since 2009, Shuangfeng County, known as the "hometown of telecom fraud", has been criticized by the Ministry of Public Security four times. In 2015, Shuangfeng County was identified as one of the key areas for national remediation, and it was required to change its appearance within a time limit.
Most of the passengers on the bus are elderly and students.
It was also in the same year that urban public transport began to usher in a reforming policy change.
In May 2015, the three ministries jointly announced the subsidy for new energy vehicles. The core information is that from 2015 to 2019, in the relevant new energy vehicle promotion catalog, pure electric buses can receive subsidies ranging from 40,000 to 80,000 yuan per vehicle per year after completing the corresponding operating mileage for one year, depending on the model and length.
As for what will happen after 2019, the above-mentioned notice said that after 2020, the operating subsidy policy will be adjusted taking into account factors such as industrial development, cost changes and preferential electricity prices.
Twin Peaks' all-electric buses are two years late. In the meantime, Hesen has shown signs of losing money due to poor vehicle condition, high insurance costs, and declining passenger traffic — but in 2017, amid the boom of subsidy policies, Wamori shareholders are still looking forward to the future of buses.
Also in those years, Shuangfeng local policies favorable to buses were introduced. Shuangfeng County** began to provide subsidies for free passenger groups, and the ticket price increased to 2 yuan.
At that time, I thought that the business would definitely get better and better, and the development trend was like this. The trend mentioned by Zhu Qingji is that with the booming real estate market in the county, the urban area is getting larger and larger, and it has become a trend for township residents to bring their children to live in the city, and the county town will not have the impact of the subway like the big cities.
At that time, Shuangfeng, as the only bus company in the county, everyone heard the wind and invested. Zhu Qingji said that the ** who bought shares and cars was speculated to more than 1 million, "but the ** in the back is too high, and the price is not marketable." ”
In order to buy the tram, Hesen Company needs to pay 12.8 million to **once**. The company has 26 shareholders, with an average of 49 per ** TEC20,000 yuan. There are more indirect shareholders behind these shareholders, and Zhu Qingji estimates that all shareholders may add up to hundreds of people, "Everyone raises funds together, and we promise to give them interest." At that time, there was a coercive smell, and even if you went to borrow usury, you had to pay the money. ”
In 2019, the subsidy for new energy buses came to the last year of the "Notice", and the operating conditions of Hesen Company also reached the peak after the car change, with an annual passenger flow of more than 2 million person-times and a total income of more than 10,000 yuan a day. Zhu Qingji said that the cost of operating 267 pure electric buses is more than 10,000 yuan a day, and the driver's salary accounts for half, including about 1,500 yuan for electricity, tire wear and management salaries.
At that time, Zhu Qingji, who had carefully read the "Notice", believed that the subsidy would continue to be issued after 2019.
The pandemic is coming. At a time when everyone was required to maintain social distancing, Peng Xinqiang, who was temporarily in charge of dispatch at the sentry box, really felt the crisis in the industry, "stipulating an interval of 1How many people can sit on a 5-meter, 8-meter-long bus, and who dares to take the bus?”
Peng Xinqiang said that during the epidemic, the deputy county magistrate came to inspect that some people did not have masks in the car, and suggested that the company distribute them free of charge and subsidize them by **, "I have done all these things well and passed the customs." The leader was transferred, and the 30,000 yuan was gone. ”
In those years, public transportation was discouraged, and the actual need to travel led county residents to seek alternatives, buying private cars, motorcycles and electric vehicles according to their own circumstances. In 2020, shared electric vehicles will also begin to appear on the streets of Shuangfeng, with a starting price of 2 yuan within 15 minutes, and they are placed at almost every intersection.
Nowadays, Mercedes-Benz buses on the streets of Shuangfeng County, two or three passengers per trip have become the norm. In fact, not only Shuangfeng County, but also the trend of operational decline hidden behind urban buses in China has already quietly occurred.
Nie Riming, a researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Finance and Law, sees 2015 as a turning point for urban public transport. He sorted out a set of data in the "China Urban Passenger Transport Development Report": the number of vehicles increased by 330,000 vehicles, but the number of bus passengers has dropped by 1.6 billion - and this trend is unstoppable, every year is a record low, from 2016 to 2019, 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities across the country, the average daily passenger volume of each car is all **, without exception.
After the epidemic is over, it is difficult for residents who are Xi to other means of transportation to return to the bus. For them, buses are no longer convenient, and as the scope of Shuangfeng County grows larger, the four routes operated by Hesen Company seem to be stretched.
This is also in line with the diversification of the national travel pattern observed by Nie Riming: in the past decade, nearly half of China's urban households have a car, and seven in ten households have electric motorcycles, and they are bound to play an increasingly important role in family travel.
At present, the real problem facing Zhu Qingji is that he cannot solve the business dilemma on his own. Against the backdrop of fewer riders, lower revenues, and high bus vacancy rates, the loss could be further extended if capacity and routes are increased. It's like a vicious circle with no solution.
Zhu Qingji estimates that Hesen's footfall is now less than one-third of what it was in 2019. Wang Wei, a bus driver, said that at present, 7 percent of the passengers are elderly, 2 percent are students, and the rest are office workers who have not bought a car. Although the face price of the ticket is 2 yuan, the actual calculation is that the average income of 1 passenger is less than 3 cents. The decline in per capita income is also related to the expansion of the free group.
In August 2023, six departments in Hunan Province issued a notice requiring all counties and cities to implement free tickets for children under the age of 14 by the end of September. Seniors, veterans are included in the free crowd.
Earlier, the Ministry of Finance said in response to the proposal of the National People's Congress on the "continuation of the new energy vehicle operation subsidy policy" that the established policy goal of the new energy bus operation subsidy has been achieved. Urban public transport is a local affair, and it is appropriate for the local government to bear the responsibility for relevant expenditures.
Bus stop signs and no-parking signs are in the flower beds.
This means that the above two funds are included in the scope of local finance. The operation of Hesen Company was calculated, and the loss calculated by themselves was more than 7 million yuan, "* only recognized the loss of 3.97 million yuan, but the recognized loss could not be taken out." ”
This is where the contradiction comes. Zhu Qingji said that after waiting for three years, "the local government is in financial difficulties and cannot afford to pay at one time." "Shuangfeng County** originally undertook the subsidy for free groups, with a subsidy of 10,000 yuan per car per year. Last year, Zhu Qingji repeatedly proposed that it should be increased, rising to 20,000 yuan, plus the subsidy for remote lines, and now the local subsidy is 1 million yuan a year.
It's too hard. Zhu Qingji said repeatedly that relying on the first-class subsidy cannot fill the hole of loss.
In fact, both private and state-run buses are facing a similar dilemma. In the article "Finding the Source of the Dilemma of Urban Public Transport", Nie Riming pointed out that the subsidy policy should bear greater responsibility for the current dilemma of urban public transport.
The reason is that when the new energy bus operation subsidy policy was implemented in 2015, the superior ** did not make it clear that the subsidy would be completely stopped in 2019, but said that after 2020, several factors would be considered to adjust the policy, even in 2019, it still gave the local bus company a certain hope, but in the end, because of the later epidemic, financial and other factors, the new energy bus operation subsidy was almost completely stopped.
In the past few years of business difficulties, the investment of many shareholders of Hesen Company has been lost, and it is Xi for employees to be in arrears. During the Spring Festival, some creditors went to the shareholders' homes to collect debts, but they did not leave, and some people were blacklisted by the bank.
On the eve of the Spring Festival in 2023, Hesen is already on the verge of suspending operations: the driver's salary is owed for 2 months, the manager is 3 months, and there is no money to buy vehicle insurance for the second year.
Several drivers went to the county to ask for subsidies, and this time they got more than 500,000 yuan - this is Hunan Province's two-year subsidy for new energy buses, **After the subsidy was cancelled, Hunan Province issued an operating subsidy.
Despite this, Zhu Qingji said that one more day of operation, the loss will increase a little, "about five or six thousand a day." "According to this amount, the amount of loss in a year is almost the same as the annual subsidy of 1.92 million yuan in the previous ** finance.
As early as 2021, in the early days of the loss, some shareholders wanted to suspend operations, but Zhu Qingji did not agree. On September 10 of this year, at the shareholders' meeting, which lasted until 11 o'clock in the evening, it was proposed that the operation be suspended the next day. Zhu Qingji objected again - his statement was that this was something that could only be done "when it really can't be done".
In the end, the plan that everyone communicated was to write an emergency report first, requesting to make up for the huge loss of policy, that is, the loss of ** financial subsidies. More than 20 shareholders signed and printed and sent it to the traffic management bureau and the letters and visits bureau.
A week has passed and no reply has been received. The shareholders of Wamori couldn't sit still.
On the evening of September 18, the shareholders calculated the number of days they could continue to operate, and the day after the meeting, they officially announced the suspension of operations. In the notice, Hesen described its situation as "difficult for a smart woman to cook without rice", and its income has decreased in a collapsing manner, and it is unable to pay for bus charging electricity and employee wages.
In addition to sticking to dozens of buses moving around the city, the notice was also sent to the ** department, and the young driver posted the matter on the Internet to publicize it.
On the same day, 100 kilometers away, the Carnival City Public Passenger Transport *** in Hengshan County, Hunan Province, made the same decision, and the reason for the suspension was the same.
On the day the notice was issued, the Shuangfeng County Transportation Administration came to me. The meeting lasted 12 hours and lasted until 2 a.m. The director of the traffic management bureau, the deputy director in charge, the staff of the transportation management bureau, the management of Hesen Company and two shareholder representatives attended the meeting.
Zhu Qingji and his staff counted the operating income in the office.
The key discussions at the conference all revolved around money. The atmosphere was at a stalemate.
Zhu Qingji said that the traffic management bureau demanded that the operation should not be suspended, and the reply of the shareholders of Hesen was, "If the real problem is not solved, we will be 'difficult for a clever woman to cook without rice', you take the money and I will charge it, and then the salary will be given to the driver, and I will go to work and run for two months." However, the traffic management bureau "can't be the master, and there is no money, so it will report to the deputy county magistrate in charge."
At 7 o'clock in the evening, the deputy county magistrate arrived, and the scope of participants was required to be expanded to all shareholders of Hesen Company. Regarding the subsidy of more than 7 million yuan in the past four years calculated by Hesen Company, Zhu Qingji said that the other party made it clear, "That's impossible, don't dream about it." It's an astronomical amount for **. ”
Zhu Qingji remembered that he ordered a boxed lunch for dinner that day. At the end of the discussion between the two sides, the deputy county magistrate promised to take tens of thousands of yuan to charge it first, without stopping, and then find a way to solve the subsidy problem. The Transportation Bureau took out 40,000 yuan to charge the bus first, and allocated another 1.1 million yuan before the National Day. The money was used to pay drivers for several months, pay bills in arrears, and return dividends to shareholders.
After this turmoil, the buses of Twin Peaks did not really stop running for a day. But Wang Wei, who also attended the meeting as a shareholder that night, no longer has a fluke mentality about the company's operation, "Private bus companies are already a dead end." ”
The Hesen company, in the southwest of the county town of Shuangfeng, is crammed with a driving school. The office is 3 white model rooms, and the red banners, signboards, and stickers on the outer walls have faded and yellowed.
A few years ago, some first-class departments went to the company to inspect the work, saying that they used dilapidated houses, which had been used for more than ten years, exceeding the service life of the construction board houses. "What does a county bus company look like? ”
Looking up to check the intricate arrangement of wires in the room, Zhu Qingji said, "You see that this line has been changed again and again, and there are major safety risks." "When it rained, it rained heavily outside the house, and it rained lightly inside, and the tarpaulin on the top was added three or four layers. He sat in his office, feeling hopeless, "I really don't want to do it anymore."
Now, those who choose to stay have practical reasons. The total staff of Hesen Company does not exceed 40 people, and Zhu Qingji knows in his heart, "Some of the old comrades who stayed behind are over 50 years old, and it is not possible to go out to find other things, so they will settle here." ”
Xiaoxiao, who is responsible for the handling and recharging of the bus card, is to take care of her two daughters. When I applied for a job a year and a half, I was taken aback by the office environment of Wamori. Although the money is not much, there is no night shift here, which can meet her needs to take care of her children's homework.
Most of the drivers who have applied for jobs recently are also for accompanying them in the county. Among them, there are also people who once felt that they worked long hours every day and left with less money, but they couldn't find a more suitable job in the county town and came back.
Chen Yuan was lucky. A few years ago, with the money he had saved from working outside for four years, he bought a house in the north of the city. The area where the house is located is also the location of many new buildings in Shuangfeng County, and some house prices are as low as more than 5,000 yuan per square meter.
The staff of the local real estate company said that there are more than 120 real estate projects in the county, large and small, but "it is now the winter of real estate, and it has been difficult to sell houses since the second half of last year, and the sales volume has halved than usual." There are also companies in grain and oil, biotechnology, steel structure, materials, betel nut and other companies in the economic development zone, "but many factories have stopped production." ”
Now Chen Yuan has no other ideas, he won't ask much about the company, as long as there is a salary, he will take care of the steering wheel. The two children in the family at least have rent to support. Although his wife's monthly salary is only more than 2,400 yuan, she has "five insurances and one housing fund".
Hesen company does not have "five insurances and one housing fund", which is what drivers care about the most. Many drivers only started buying workers' compensation insurance last year.
The younger ones are also gone, driving buses in big cities, or simply changing careers after experiencing hardship. Drivers joke with each other that they specialize in developing talent for other bus companies.
For Hesen Company, without the high subsidy of **, they are unable to reverse the loss situation on their own. Nie Riming also raised a possibility: looking back, urban public transport should have begun to transform after 2014, cutting routes and raising fares, but in order to promote new energy buses, energy conservation and emission reduction transfer payments, not only heavily subsidized purchase expenditures, but also subsidized bus operating expenses, and adjusted other transfer payments to guide local purchases of new energy buses.
This process has further dulled the perception of the decline of the industry by public transport companies and local governments, and has failed to reduce buses, and the number of buses has grown against the trend. However, after the cancellation of the transfer payment policy, buses and employees could not be cut by homeopathy, and when the local finance could not fill the gap, the bus naturally stopped.
A shared electric car parked on a street corner in Shuangfeng County.
Xiao Zou, a bus fan in Changsha, observed that some of the buses in other cities that have the same problems as Hesen are already trying to transform: some places have customized buses as wedding cars, or have been borrowed by bars for promotion, packaged as mobile discotheques, and for example, Jinan has set up a special bus line for scenic spots, and so on.
However, Xiao Zou thinks that due to the decline of subsidies year by year, it is already very good for private enterprises that are now doing road transportation to run, "A city cannot do without public transportation, there will be people who need it." ”
After more than two months of suspension of operation, there is still no answer to the problem faced by Hesen. On the 15th of every month, Zhu Qingji will still have a meeting with the drivers in the hotel opposite the station. The desire of most drivers is to hope that ** will be acquired earlier, on the grounds that "at least there is social security".
The first acquisition that everyone is waiting for refers to the integration of urban and rural passenger transport. This year, Shuangfeng County was identified as the fourth batch of counties for urban-rural integration in Hunan Province. According to the information of the Hunan Provincial Road Transport Administration, the creation time is 2 years in principle.
This time, Zhu Qingji talked about the trend again, "The integration of urban and rural passenger transport is an inevitable trend, and the masses have this demand." His basis is that students from the villages around the county go to school in the urban areas, and several villages have jointly written a report hoping to open public transportation, and he also wants to open it, but the conflict with the rural bus line cannot be reconciled.
Zhu Qingji still checks the condition of the car in the office every day. At five or six o'clock in the afternoon on weekdays, the ** bell in his house will ring frequently, usually when students call to ask about the location of the bus.
His office is about six or seven square meters, and the room is filled with tables, chairs, and sofas. A large monitor is connected to the car's camera, which shows the location of each car in real time on a map, which is all there is to the company.
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