Society

100,000 migrant workers motorbike home

By Zuo Likun (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-02-09 15:54

One hundred thousand people are expected to join the corps of migrant workers in south China's Guangdong province who drive home on motorbikes for the Spring Festival, police said to the Nanfang Daily.

The daily exodus of motorcycling migrants through the southern Zhaoqing city, a bottleneck connecting Guangdong and southwest hinterlands, was a pageant too swarming to be ignored that local police officers have set up at least 20 interval stations for drivers to refill and refresh, a preventive measure aimed at fewer road accidents and travel chaos.

On average two migrant workers sit on each motorbike, sometimes with a kid placed in between, equipped with safety helmets, bulky outerwear, leather gloves and knee pads, all must gear for an over-ten-hour drive in cold air during the winter.

Two migrant workers in Zhongshan city, surnamed as Zhang and Zhou in the news report, decided to drive home together, in turn of course, which they said was much cheaper and cost only 100 yuan (US$14.5), a sixth of the conventional expenditure on public commutes.

The annual phenomena in the booming factory zone underlies the country's emasculate railway capacity and the behemoth travel tide ahead of the Spring Festival, the most important traditional holiday for families getting-together.