Chinese travelers made an estimated 52.48 million bus trips on
Wednesday, the first day of the Spring Festival road transport
peak, according to the Ministry of Communications.
The figure compares with 49.5 million for the same period of last
year.
A total of 760,000 buses were in service nationwide on
Wednesday.
Although China's railway travel peak began six days earlier than
expected this year, the peak period for bus travel runs from
Wednesday to March 2. The lunar New Year begins on Feb. 7.
The government expects a record 2.15 billion bus trips to be
taken for family gatherings and holidays during the 40 days, an
increase of five percent from last year.
By Wednesday, most of the expressways in the country that had
been closed due to snow were reopened, but 3,400 people remained
stranded in southwestern Guizhou province.
Transport authorities in snowstorm-hit Hubei province in central
China dispatched 30,000 road maintenance workers on Wednesday,
while 6,000 workers cleared snow from a 2,300-kilometer expressway
between Beijing and the southern city of Zhuhai.
Snow will continue to hit the southern, central and eastern
areas from Jan. 25 to 27, posing a greater challenge to the
country's transportation system, according to China's
meteorological authorities.
Central China's Henan province and the northern part of east
China's Anhui province would see snows weaken in a couple of days
as the cold air edged south,
"But another gust of snow will soon attack southwestern Sichuan,
Guizhou, central Hunan and Hubei as well as eastern Jiangxi and
part of Anhui," said Bi Baogui, deputy director of the Central
Meteorological Observatory.
(Xinhua News Agency January 24, 2008)
