Railway stations present many annoyances to passengers: long queues in front of safety checkpoints, difficulty hailing taxis or finding a parking spot, difficulty finding ticket machines, and tedious procedures for entering and exiting the station.

In March 2019, Zhejiang authorities selected the Hangzhou East Station to pilot a service efficiency improvement project targeting the province's public places.

Through the joint efforts of the Hangzhou municipal government, the administrative committee of Hangzhou East Station, tech giant Alibaba Group, and other relevant organizations, the station has now seen more than 40 of its services improved.

The improvements include adding taxi parking spots and a parking zone specifically for online ride-hailing, charging parking fees only after the car leaves the parking lot, and waiving metro station safety checks for passengers coming directly from the railway station.

The average time it takes for passengers to get from the station entrance to the waiting room has been shortened from 20 minutes to just 14 minutes. The average time it takes for inbound passengers to leave the station has dropped from nearly half an hour to around 15 minutes. Hangzhou East Station received 71.9 million outbound passengers in 2019, and the service improvements are estimated to have saved them a total of around 24 million hours.

Zhejiang has also been rolling out similar service improvement projects in 141 public sites across the province. In June, the province officially proposed significantly increasing service efficiency at all traffic facilities, tourist attractions, cultural sites, shopping malls, markets, public stadiums and gyms, hospitals, vehicle inspection stations, and public toilets.