China on Saturday announced the start of the annual peak travel
season around the traditional
Spring Festival, or Chinese lunar new year, which falls on
January 29.
Railways, highways, passenger ships and airlines around China
are bracing up for the festival transport peak. The country has
identified a 40-day period -- from Jan. 14 to Feb. 22 -- as the
peak travel season.
Chinese transport departments estimated the total number of
passengers for journeys to be close to 2 billion this year, over 90
percent of whom would choose land transport.
A record 301 pairs of temporary trains are expected to be
launched on Chinese railways for the peak travel season, according
to the Ministry of Railways. This is 59 pairs more than that for
last year's festival, up 24 percent.
About 700,000 large and medium-sized buses will go into service
during this season, said Vice Minister of Communications Feng
Zhenglin.
Both railway and highway transport departments have temporarily
increased the number of ticket offices and extended the selling
period to cope with the soaring demand in the peak season.
The number of railway ticket offices in the national capital
Beijing has amounted to 1,087 during the travel season, according
to official statistics.
The Ministry of Communications also expected that 28 million
people will choose water transport during the season, up 1.5
percent year on year.
Meanwhile, about 15 million passengers will travel by air, and
Chinese airlines plan to add 8,400 flights during the season.
Air China, the country's flag carrier, has arranged a total of
1,624 charter flights during the imminent Spring Festival.
The added charter flights grew 34 percent as compared with the
previous Spring Festival period, with some 239,000 more seats
provided, Air China said.
A special office was set up by Air China to monitor the Spring
Festival transportation situation.
People around China greet the traditional Spring Festival as
very special days for family reunion. For years, the nationwide
transport network was strained during the season, as millions of
migrant workers and other people hurried back home and returned to
their work places in just two weeks.
On Saturday morning, Minister of Communications Li Shenglin paid
a visit to a long-distance coach station in southern Beijing,
during which. he said he hoped that no serious traffic mishaps
would occur and no passenger would spend the Lunar New Year's eve
in station halls.
(Xinhua News Agency January 15, 2006)
