CRI听力： Road Transport Expects Passenger Flow Peak

The post spring festival travel peak has arrived with students returning to schools and migrant workers going back to work. The Shanghai Long-distance Bus Station received over 1,500 buses carrying tens of thousand of travelers back to the city on Sunday. According to the director of the station, it has been a very different spring festival travel season.

Our Shanghai correspondent Zhou Jing has more.

Reporter:

On Sunday, roads across the country transported over 60 million passengers, 2.5 percent more than the same period last year. Students returning to schools and rural migrant workers going back to work contributed to the peak, which is expected to last until after the traditional Lantern Festival, which falls on this Thursday.

The Shanghai Long-distance bus station is in full operation in the recent days with thousands of long-haul buses leaving and arriving at the station everyday.

However, according to Zhang Yongbin, director of the station, the biggest number of inflow passengers is yet to come.

"Large number of migrant workers and those who went home to visit families are coming back around the 15th of the first lunar month, which is the Lantern Festival."

From now till then, the number of arriving travelers is expected to reach 35 to 38 thousand every day, for which Zhang Yongbin says the station is prepared.

"Our station has enough space for the incoming buses. We can open two floors for arrivals. And we've added more redcaps to help passengers with their luggage."

Though everything is under control now, with the unexpected snow storms hitting large part of China, the first half of this spring festival travel was a huge challenge to Zhang Yongbin and his colleagues.

"We've suffered a lot of pressure during this spring festival travel period. The big snow overthrew all of our original plans."

The first 15 days of this travel season saw a decrease of 6 thousand outbound buses compared to that of last year.

However, the workload of people of the station increased.

"When all routes were at a standstill on Feb 2nd, over 8,000 passengers were stranded at our station. Our staff provided round-the-clock service to them. All the ticket selling windows were changed to ticket returning."

As the weather improved around the country, Zhang Yongbin says over 1,100 out of 1,200 shuttle routes of the bus station have resumed, the rest of which are all expected to go back to normal this week.

For China Drive, I'm Zhou Jing, CRI News, Shanghai.