Summer vacation travel rush closes with record high traffic
It has been a record summer for the city's railways.
The city's three major railway stations for the first time recorded more than 20 million passengers leaving Shanghai during the summer holiday.
During the 62-day vacation, which ran from July 1 to August 31, a total of 20.84 million passengers left the city via the three railway stations, — a record high, the city's railway authority said.
The three stations' daily traffic was about 290,000 in the first half of this year, while the number increased to 336,000 during the summer vacation period, up by some 15 percent. The traffic was 9.8 percent higher than last year's summer vacation.
The authority added that most of the traffic concerned short-distance trips over weekends. About 44 percent of the total traffic were ferried from Fridays to Sundays.
To meet the increasing travel demand, the authority added 540 train services during the travel rush period.
Fuxing, China's new-generation high-speed bullet train, had four pairs of train services running between Shanghai and Beijing during the vacation. The four services departing from Shanghai had an average occupancy rate of about 86 percent, with the G4 train service’s occupancy rate hitting nearly 99 percent.
From September 21, a total of seven pairs of Fuxing train services will run between the two cities at a speed of 350 kilometers per hour, which will cut the travel time by 21 minutes to about 4.5 hours. The ticket price will remain the same after the speed increase.
Train tickets for next month's National Holiday are available. It is expected that highest single day traffic will hit 500,000 passengers, the authority said.
Under the influence of Typhoon Mawar, 26 train services running between the Yangtze River area to southern China’s Guangdong Province were suspended on Sunday, which including eight scheduled to leave or arrive in Shanghai.