Year of Dog Travel Rush Begins

China1273Feb 01, 2018

In 2018, the Year of Dog, the Chunyun lasts for 40 days from February 1 to March 12, during which 2.97 billion passengers were handled, almost the same with last year.

As the Year of Dog (February 15 - 21) is approaching, the most busy and nerve-inducing travel rush kicks off in China.

The spring festival travel rush, also known as "Chunyun", is rated as the largest-scale periodic human migration throughout the history. During about 40 days around every lunar new year, Chinese people, especially migrant workers, rush to head for their hometown to celebrate the new year with their families, and return to their working place after the festival, leading to extremely heavy traffic jams. In about 30 years, the number of passengers handled during Chunyun is said to increase from 100 million to 3.7 billion (in 2015), which accounts for 53% of the world population (about 7 billion).

In 2018, the Year of Dog, the Chunyun lasts for 40 days from February 1 to March 12, during which 2.97 billion passengers were handled, almost the same with last year. This year, the difficulty in getting train tickets have been eased further; new vehicles especially the Xi'an-Chengdu, Baoji-Lanzhou high-speed railways are put into operation; and numerous technological measures and people-oriented services are adopted, such as mobile payment, "face swiping" check-in, through transport, etc. According to some third-party statistics, 74.8% of the passengers surveyed are satisfied with the measures and services during this Chunyun, an increase of 3.8 percentage points from last year.