The post-festival passenger peak is straining transportation
facilities as Spring Festival holidaymakers began returning
to their places of work or home from travels, said Chinese railway
officials.
Beijing's two railway stations saw more than 100,000 passengers
return to the city on Thursday and that number is expected to rise
sharply over the next couple of days, railway officials said.
The Chinese New Year holiday week ends on Saturday.
Beijing's train stations, airport and bus depots are expected to
handle 500,000 per day from Feb. 22 to March 5.
According to the Ministry of Railways, the number of people
taking trains will peak from Feb. 23 to 27, with 4.5 million
passengers per day, 160,000 more per day than last year.
From March 6 to 9, rail passengers will peak at four million per
day, also 160,000 more per day than the same period last year.
The Ministry of Railways has put on a record 636 additional
trains each day, during the 40-day Spring Festival travel period,
which runs from Feb. 3 and March 14.
As a major destination for returned migrant workers, Guangzhou,
capital city of the booming Guangdong Province in south China, saw
approximately 150,000 passenger arrivals at its railway station on
Friday.
According to Guangzhou railway bureau, most of them were migrant
workers returning from Henan, Sichuan and Hunan provinces.
The railway bureau of Nanchang, capital of east China's Jiangxi Province, laid on an extra 45 and 66
trains respectively on Wednesday and Thursday to cope with the
flood of return passengers.
On Friday, 620,000 train passengers arrived in Shanghai. The
local railway bureau will lay on 566 extra trains in the next two
days.
During the 20-day post-festival transportation period, more than
16.1 million people will leave Shanghai by train, a year-on-year
growth of 481,000. The peak is expected to be around March 5 when
single day transportation volume may reach 760,000 passengers.
The Ministry of Railways estimates that China's railways will
transport an unprecedented 156 million passengers during the 40-day
Spring Festival travel peak from Feb. 3 to March 14, up 4.3 percent
year-on-year.
Passenger flows were concentrated in Beijing and Guangzhou
during the first 15 days and will be concentrated in Chengdu, Chongqing, Wuhan, Nanchang and Hefei during
the remaining 25 days.
China's highway transportation will handle 2 billion people
during the Spring Festival period, up 5 percent from the same
period last year, according to the Ministry of Communications.
China has 76,600 km of railways in operation at the end of 2006.
Last year, trains transported 1.25 billion passengers.
Meanwhile, civil aviation services in major cities will also see
a peak of return passengers.
The charter flights between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan
started post-festival service on Friday. A total of 96 round-trip
flights, operated by six mainland and six Taiwanese airlines, are
scheduled for the period from Feb. 23 to 26.
The charter flights are available in six cities, including
Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xiamen on the Chinese mainland, and
Taipei and Kaohsiung in Taiwan.
On Friday, travelers also thronged to major ports to take their
way back. So far, nearly 4,000 passenger liners on the Yellow Sea
and the Bohai Sea in east China have provided services to more than
515,000 passengers.
(Xinhua News Agency February 24, 2007)
