Chunyun
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Chunyun refers to the high traffic load of transportation in China around the Chinese New Year. The high traffic load usually begins 15 days before the Spring Festival, and lasts for 40 days. This period is also called Spring Festival travel season, or Chunyun period.
The number of passengers during the Chunyun period was 1.22 billion in 1994, and 1.89 billion in 2004; most of them are railway passengers. The number of passengers during the 2006 Chunyun period is expected to be 2.042 billion. During this period, traffic networks are overloaded, and many social problems arise.
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[edit] Origin
Chunyun is the combined result of Chinese people from all around the world returning home to celebrate the Spring Festival with family, and the increasing Floating Population in mainland China caused by the Chinese economic reform doing the same thing.
The Spring Festival is the most important holiday in Chinese culture, marking the beginning of a year in the Chinese calendar. Chinese come home from work and study and have the Reunion dinner with their family on New Year's eve. The celebration lasts fifteen days, and ends with the Lantern Festival. In the People's Republic of China, the official Spring Festival holiday lasts a week, beginning with the Spring Festival, but many Chinese return home earlier and return work after the end of the official holiday.
After the Chinese economic reform, several Special Economic Zones were created, and attracted a large portion of the population to work in their booming cities. In addition, the Chinese education reform increased the number of university students, who often study outside their home town [1]. Among the 144 million railway passengers of the 2006 Chunyun period were 6.95 million university students, about a third of the total, who had booked student tickets [2]. The number of members of the Floating Population was estimated at 50 million at 1990 and unofficially estimated at 150 million to 200 million in 2000[3].
[edit] Impact on transportation systems
The most affected modes of transportation are inter-city surface passenger transportation systems, namely railway and road networks. International, urban and waterway transportation are only slightly affected [4]. Due to the high demand, the prices of tickets are increased during the period[5].
The Ministry of Railways estimated that 144 million passengers would take trains during the 2006 Chunyun period; in other words, 3.6 million passengers per day. However, the average daily capacity of the Chinese railway system is 2.8 million. The shorage of railway resources led many passengers to pay double- or even triple-priced tickets from scalpers or to wait in queues for tens of hours at railway stations.
Hundreds of temporary trains and hundreds of thousands of temporary buses are operated during this period, the number of ticket offices is increased and selling periods are extended to cope with the demand. Batch orders from schools and factories are organized. However, these measures are generally inadequate. For example, during the 2005 Chunyun period, the ticket offices in Shenzhen had tens of telephone lines, and at times got millions of calls per hour. In the Guangzhou area, the number of calls reached 19.91 million per hour. Guangzhou Railway Group increased the number of telephone lines at their ticket offices to 6,000 in the 2006 Chunyun period.
The passenger flow during the Chunyun period is usually imbalanced. Before the Spring Festival, passengers usually gather in developed coastal cities, railway interchange cities such as Beijing and Guangzhou, and basically flow from urban to rural areas. The passenger flow directions is reversed after the Spring Festival. In addition, passenger flow is very sensitive to disruption, such as bad weather [6].
Air transportation is less affected as most travellers are workers, but nevertheless Chunyun impact is increasing. Xiamen Airlines, for example, adds nearly 190 flights to its roster during the Chunyun period, with thirty flights dedicated to Hong Kong and Macau and another ten flights to international destinations in Southeast Asia and Korea.[7]
