When Operational Inefficiency Negates the Benefits of Massive Size

The international terminal at Harbin’s Airport feels crowded from the early morning. In front of the check-in counters are a few rows of seats in a tiny waiting area, holding a couple of hundreds of people waiting for check-in to start for just two international flights. Once the staff announce that check-in is open, everyone rush through just one X-ray machine that checks their bags before the check-in line. With space limited between the X-ray machine and the check-in counters, lines and crowds pack themselves both in front of and behind the X-ray machine. The scene is repeated after check-in, with passengers lining up again in narrow corridors, first in front of two open security lines, and then two immigrant stamping booths.

Yet, once the passengers are through immigration, what greets them are three full rooms with dozens of seats in front of boarding gates. The massive and mostly empty secondary waiting area is just up and then down a set of stairs, right next to the cramped check-in area behind a flimsy partition. Only if the airport move the partition slightly, it can shift some of the underutilized space in the waiting area in front of the gates to alleviate the overcrowding in front of the check-in counters. At the moment, however, the big space of the terminal is being wasted, while the crowds are stuck in a bottleneck. 

Chinese people are often extremely proud of the country’s new infrastructure projects, noting how they are often so big that the architecture themselves are prominent enough to be spectacles.  The government justify the massive size of the projects by detailing projected capacities, with transport nodes such as railway stations and airports especially built big to handle dramatic increases in passenger numbers that are bound to happen in the near future.  Certainly, there is no doubt that the passengers will increase for the country’s roads, railways, and airlines as more companies have nationwide and international presence, while increased wealth provide more people with the ability to travel for leisure. 

However, looking more closely at how these massive new transport nodes operate in reality puts into question whether their massive sizes alone can really be correlated with the ability to actually handle the projected numbers the government put forth when constructing them.  As illustrated by the imbalance of long lines and lack of space one part and too much underutilized space on the other at the Harbin Airport, bad designs for how such transport nodes actually operate leads to bottlenecks in the facility that essentially cut down how many people they can handle in a given period of time.  It is those bottlenecks that determine the facilities’ operational capacity and not how big the facilities as a whole are.

Without a doubt, having a big building itself gives more potential for designers to create a space that allow more people to be processed and held, but whether the aims can actually be implemented successfully largely depend on how the space is partitioned and processes implemented, with continual improvements to ensure bottlenecks are eliminated to speed up work for operators on the ground and reduce frustration for travelers using the facilities.  Such designs, in many ways, are a much more dynamic and complex process taking into account how people work and move, an exercise much more difficult than the one-time exercise of designing and building a massive yet structurally sound architecture. 

The inability of the Chinese to fully utilize the massive size of their engineering marvels due to continued presence of bottlenecks illustrate how the “software” of operations is behind the “hardware” of building things.  Bottlenecks exist for years and years not because people do not notice them, but those who notice them accept them as just how things are and thus not subject to change for the better.  The satisfaction of both the workers and users of the facilities with the mediocrity of operations display a quintessential characteristic of Chinese mentality today, a blind belief in how new and bigger things can simply mask operational inefficiencies.  When more resources are thrown at a problem rather than looking at the underlying causes, they think the problem will just go away.

In some ways, such a mentality is responsible for overinvestment in many physical infrastructure when many times, simple improvements in existing facilities can achieve similar results at a fraction of the costs.  Of course, ulterior motives for building new things exist: they stimulate the economy by creating jobs and keeping construction firms in business, and they stimulate patriotism by giving citizens something to be proud about.  But they also create plenty of grievances for people living near the new facilities, with financial and mental costs of relocation and noise leading to protests. The bigger the facilities, no doubt the bigger the disturbances caused nearby. Are such investments really worth it in the long run when the benefits to the economy and patriotism are so short-term?

A bit of change in mentality among both the Chinese leaders and the general populace is in order. Instead of always pursuing the biggest, newest, longest, and the tallest, it makes more sense to think about how to make what is already there operate better through better designs, processes, and personnel trainings. Because when all the energy goes to building the next thing, people ignore what’s already there. And when the new thing is built, all the bad practices from the past are simply carried over, making the new thing just as bad as the old, only on a bigger scale. The leaders have to realize that when a new thing is built, people expect it to be better than the old, not just in looks, but functionality. When the expectation cannot be satisfied, the patriotic motive of building the new thing in the first place can quickly backfire.