Friday brings second peak in passenger traffic for holiday

Tourists jostle each other in a crowd at the Badaling section of the Great Wall in Beijing on Monday, the third day of the National Day holiday. Liu Debin / Xinhua

BEIJING - The National Day holiday ended with a second extremely busy period of travel as people from throughout the country returned to the places they live in and work in most of the year.

In large cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, cars were waiting in long lines in front of tollgates and passengers were crowding into the exits of railway stations as they made return journeys from their hometowns or travel destinations.

In China, the only holiday that sees more travel than National Day is Spring Festival, which comes in January or February every year.

On Thursday afternoon, vehicles backed up before tollgates on the Beijing-Shenyang and Beijing-Tibet highways outside downtown Beijing, according to Beijing Youth Daily.

The same situation occurred in Shanghai on Friday afternoon; cars waited in lines stretching for hundreds of meters outside tollgates, local traffic police said on an official micro blog.

According to the Ministry of Transport, travelers in China were expected to use cars or buses to make 75.8 million trips on Friday.

The Ministry of Railways predicted there would be more than 7 million railway journeys made on Friday and made arrangements for 295 temporary trains to help alleviate the increasing traffic pressure.

Beijing alone expected to receive 300,000 rail passengers on Friday. In the Beijing West Railway Station, hundreds of passengers lined up to get a taxi on Friday afternoon. Most of them had to wait as long as two hours.

Liu Feng, a migrant worker from East China's Anhui province, said on Friday that he knew he could have avoided contending with so many other travelers if had waited for another day before making his return trip. But he felt as if he had no other option.

"It is just as hard to ask for one more day off," he said.

For 17 hours on a train leaving from Wuhu in Anhui province, Liu found himself so surrounded by a crowd that he could barely get up from his seat.

On the seven days of the National Day holiday, about 67 million travelers rode the rails, according to a China Central Television report.

Meanwhile, more than 5.98 million trips were made on airlines from October 1 to 7, 5.2 percent more than in 2010, it said. The airports in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Shenzhen are among the busiest in the country.

Wang Kaihao contributed to this story.