Over 220 mln passenger trips expected on 24th day of Spring Festival travel season

China's national transportation systems handled an estimated 220.38 million cross-regional passenger trips on Thursday, the 24th day of the Spring Festival travel rush, less than on previous days following the end of the Spring Festival holiday.

Among these, 15 million trips were by rail, 202.13 million by road, 850,000 by water, and 2.4 million by air, statistics showed.

On Wednesday, there were around 231.5 million cross-regional passenger trips, a decrease of 28.5 percent from the previous day, which was the seventh day of the Chinese New Year or the last day of Spring Festival holiday this year. This figure is also 24.9 percent lower than the same period in 2024, when the Spring Festival holiday ended on the eighth day of the Chinese New Year.

China's railway network handled 16.633 million passenger trips, down 2.4 percent from the previous day but up 3.5 percent from the same day in last year's travel rush.

Road trips totaled 211.43 million, decreasing 30.3 percent from the previous day and 26.8 percent from the previous year.

Waterway passenger trips amounted to 1.023 million, falling 16.2 percent from the previous day and 14.1 percent from the previous year.

Meanwhile, 2.45 million passengers took to the skies, up 0.26 percent from the previous day and 2.27 percent from the previous year.

Pre-holiday and post-holiday travel were especially concentrated in key urban clusters like the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei cluster, the Yangtze River Delta, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and the Chengdu-Chongqing region.

The 40-day travel rush, known as "chunyun" in Chinese, runs from Jan 14 to Feb 22. It is considered the world's largest annual human migration and coincides with China's biggest traditional festival celebrations, a time when Chinese people return home for family reunions to celebrate the Chinese New Year, which fell on Jan 29 this year.

Over 220 mln passenger trips expected on 24th day of Spring Festival travel season

At least one person has died and several others have been hospitalized after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake hit Indonesia’s Maluku Strait early on Thursday morning, with the quake also causing varying degrees of damage to multiple buildings in Manado, the capital city of the North Sulawesi province. The quake struck at 06:48 local time Thursday at a magnitude of 7.4 and a depth of 30 kilometers, according to measurements by the China Earthquake Networks Center (CENC).

There were scenes of panic outside a hospital in Manado when the quake hit, with several seconds of intense shaking causing cracks to appear in the building of the medical facility which belongs to the Siloam private healthcare group.

Patients and medical staff were urgently evacuated to the roadside, with some seen in wheelchairs or still connected to intravenous (IV) drips, while others were even pushed out of the wards on their hospital beds. A car parked downstairs was hit by falling debris, shattering its windows.

"Some people were sleeping at the time, some had just undergone surgery, and others were receiving treatment. The earthquake damaged the hospital's ceiling, and I also saw some cracks in the walls," said Billy Lombok, the family member of a patient.

A tsunami warning was issued but later lifted following the quake as Indonesian authorities observed no significant sea level changes.

Patients rushed out from hospital building as 7.4-magnitude quake hits Indonesia, killing one