Baku, January 16, AZERTAC

As the Spring Festival draws near, Chinese travelers packed into cars, trains and planes on Tuesday, kicking off the landmark chunyun, the world's largest annual human migration, according to China Daily.

Chinese authorities expect an unprecedented 9 billion inter-regional trips during this year's chunyun, or Spring Festival travel rush. The 40-day travel period began on Tuesday and will continue through Feb. 22.

More electric car owners and foreign tourists are expected to join the annual travel frenzy, traditionally featuring millions of migrant workers and others living far from their hometowns who head back to reunite with family and celebrate China's most important festival. This is the first year 22-year-old construction site technician Yang Bo has joined chunyun. He chose to drive home, setting off with his dog early on Tuesday morning.

Yang works in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, which is over 1,000 kilometers away from his hometown of Qianjiang, a city in central China. The drive will take more than 10 hours. To save on travel costs, Yang began searching for carpool partners online in late December and has found three co-passengers on the long journey home. This year, road trips are expected to dominate the annual travel rush, accounting for about 80 percent of all inter-regional journeys. An estimated 7.2 billion road trips are projected, with highways likely to experience record-breaking single-day traffic peaks.

The rise of carpooling has also become evident on Chinese social media platforms. On the Xiaohongshu lifestyle app, posts marked with the hashtag "carpooling home for Spring Festival" have garnered over 5.6 million views and nearly 180,000 comments. New energy vehicles (NEVs) are set to be a key feature of this year's homeward journeys. As of November 2024, a total of 33,100 charging stations have been installed across the country's highway service areas, with 97 percent of these areas now equipped with charging facilities, according to Gao Bo, an official of the Ministry of Transport.

To accommodate the travel surge, highway service areas are promoting ultrafast charging stations, optimizing placement based on traffic volume, and introducing intelligent solutions such as charging robots, Gao said. China's railway and civil aviation authorities have also increased travel capacities to ensure smoother transportation. Over 510 million passenger trips will be handled by the country's railways during the period, with an average of 12.75 million trips daily, an increase of 5.5 percent compared with the previous year.