Spring Festival to see 3 billion trips made by road, rail, airplane

Nearly 3 billion trips are estimated to be made by Chinese during the upcoming Spring Festival travel rush, authorities said on Monday.

This year's Spring Festival rush will begin on Jan 13 and end on Feb 21. Administration departments including the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Public Security and the China Railway Construction Corp, jointly released a guideline on Monday to ensure safe and smooth trips.

The number of trips, which includes trips by road, rail, aviation and waterways, is 2.2 percent higher than last year, the guideline said.

To benefit passengers, railways and road service providers are encouraged to be creative when selling tickets, including selling tickets on applications and supporting payment on mobile phones.

Railway companies are required to use technical methods to curb scalping.

Next year's Spring Festival falls on Jan 28. It is the country's most important holiday for family reunions, with hundreds of millions of people traveling across the country, testing national transportation networks.

Chinese have never been more affluent and keen to travel, nor have there ever been more migrant workers in cities far from home. Every year, the stresses on the country's transportation systems increase, despite improvements in infrastructure over the past few years.

Transport networks - road, rail, aviation and waterways - have experienced record numbers of travelers during Spring Festival almost every year for the past decade.

To reduce crowds during the rush and to boost transport efficiency, China has been stepping up construction of high-speed railways, the total length of which exceeded 20,000 km this year, making it the world's longest high-speed railway system.

Xinhua contributed to this story.

(China Daily 12/06/2016 page5)