Preparing for holiday travel rush

The Spring Festival travel peak is expected to start from this Saturday. Air, rail and road passenger transport departments across China have joined hands to ease the upcoming passenger flow.

Nanjing, the capital city of Jiangsu Province start to brace itself for the travel rush of returning students and migrant workers from Tuesday. To ease the pressure, Nanjing Railway Station has set up a temporary ticket office issuing long-distance bus tickets.

Jiang Xihui of Nanjing Railway Station, said, "We cooperate with highway passenger transportation departments telling them in which directions there are shortages of tickets. In addition, we shifted some railway ticket windows to highway ticket windows."

To improve safety, Nanjing Long-distance Bus Passenger Transportation Group has installed GPS on all its long-distance buses. The GPS will issue a warning if the bus exceeds the speed limit. In addition, all buses are equipped with cameras. The control center can supervise all running buses 24 hours a day.

Beijing Railway Bureau is expected to transport 21 million passengers, ten percent of the total volume of this year's travel peak.

Beijing Railway Station has started selling tickets for Saturday, the first day of Spring Festival transportation. To ease the pressure, the station has set up 60 temporary ticket windows.

While in another busy city Shanghai, the railway station has opened 728 windows selling tickets, a record. Transportation capacity is stretched from Shanghai to Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan provinces.

The Civil Aviation department is expected to add an extra 6,000 flights to deal with the travel peak during the Spring Festival.

Changchun, Yantai, Taiyuan and Nanning are new cities in the mainland running direct charter flights to Taiwan. So far, 31 mainland cities have 374 flights to Taiwan island each week. While Hong Kong Special Administration Region has 225 charter flights each week to 15 cities in the mainland.