Chinese holiday tourism enthusiasm continues

Hundreds of cars queued across dozens of lanes as holidaymakers tried to make it home for the end of the week-long National Day festival, which commemorates the creation of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949.

Photos of the Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway show hundreds of thousands of families on their way home on the penultimate day of the holidays.

A mind-boggling video, shot by reporters from Legal Evening News, shows thousands of Beijing-bound vehicles being caught up near a toll for as far as eyes can see.

Imagine this: it is home to the headquarters of most of China’s largest state-owned companies, the city’s history dates back three millennia, and has been the political center of the country for much of the past eight centuries.

The bottleneck on the other side of the toll booth was a result of the road being drastically reduced from 50 to fewer than 20 lanes.

The shocking scenes were one of the many traffic nightmares across the country yesterday.

Motorways in other major cities including Shanghai also experienced large-scale disruption. The bureau also cautioned drivers via its website that the death toll in road traffic accidents during the National Day holiday had increased 7.8 percent on average each year over the past five years.

The National Tourism Administration in China approximated that 750 million people would go on holiday during the week-long national holiday-half of China’s total population.