On the eve of the Lunar New Year holiday, China shifted into high gear on Friday. Tourists were packing trains and aircraft to return to their hometowns, while families were getting ready for customary reunion dinner gatherings.The nation has been expanding its travel capacity in an effort to facilitate travel after severe weather forced millions of people to postpone their Christmas travels home.
Global Times, a state media agency, reports that 1,873 passenger trains were added in a single day across a sizable railway network, setting a record. Following crippling train service earlier in the week due to snow and freezing rain, which left some passengers stranded on trains for hours as power supplies were interrupted, railway traffic increased.
A number of provinces expeditiously upgraded their emergency response protocols in order to eliminate snowfall that impeded traffic on numerous roadways, leaving motorists stranded. Authorities labored to de-ice airport runways and aircraft, as well as to remove ice from power cables and train tracks. On Wednesday alone, 13.1 million people traveled on China’s national railway during the largest travel migration period in history.
According to Global Times, that was the first time that the number of travelers passing through each day during the Chunyun season—the month leading up to the Spring Festival—surpassed 13 million. 475,000 people were anticipated at Shanghai’s railway stations on Friday, up 61.7% over the same time in 2019, according to Shanghai government-owned The Paper.
The Shanghai train network was predicted to carry 7,170,900 people in the two weeks preceding the Spring Festival, more than all of the passengers in the same period in 2019, according to The Paper. Officially, the eight-day holiday starts on Saturday, but many people choose to start their vacation early.
It’s also the first anniversary of China completely lifting COVID-19 restrictions that had interfered with the holiday for the three years before. It was predicted that hundreds of millions of people’s travel plans home would be ruined by the unpredictably bad weather in central and southern China during the Lunar New Year holiday, the worst in recent memory.
Unusually cold temperatures and ice storms in central and southern China in 2008 resulted in at least 129 fatalities, severe traffic jams, and millions of people without electricity or water as they slogged home. For the next few days, most places should have typical seasonal temperatures, according to Chinese weather analysts.