Could ridesharing apps solve China’s Spring Festival transit woes?

Image credit: Tom Booth

If you’ve ever been in China during the Spring Festival holiday, you’ve probably seen something like this. This is what happens when all of the world’s most populous country tries to go home for the holidays, resulting in the largest annual human migration on earth. The Spring Festival travel season is called Chunyun, and it will see some two billion journeys this year. It will also suck. Spring Festival itself might be fun, but there’s nothing fun about fighting crowds for hours at the train station, jamming yourself sardine-style into overpacked trains, and then spending the whole holiday dreading having to do it again to get back.

Is there a way around it? Sort of. Air travel is less packed (since there are no standing tickets on planes and carry-on luggage can’t be too bulky), but prices are high and tickets tend to sell out fast. Car travel may be the slowest approach (especially given the traffic jams) but it’s also probably the easiest and most comfortable: there’s no need to fight over tickets, no need to squeeze into tiny, rock-hard seats next to dozens of other travelers, and no need to wait in massive airport security lines or schlep all your baggage through the concrete jungles of China’s mass transportation infrastructure.

The problem with trying to drive home for Spring Festival, of course, is that you need to own a car.

Or at least, you did. This year’s Spring Festival could be different. Chinese ridesharing app Didi Kuaidi recently expanded its carpooling service Hitch to facilitate long-distance travel. Previously, Hitch could only be used to grab rides within a city, but starting from this year’s National Day holiday, hitching longer rides has been made available. Didi says its longest Hitch trip so far spanned a massive 2,673 km, although most users tend to break it out for shorter trips.

Could this actually help congestion during China’s Spring Festival madness? It’s hard to say. On the one hand, with so many people all trying to go somewhere at once, congestion is inevitable. Ideally, hitching rides via ridesharing apps should allow more people to take cars home for the holidays, decreasing the number of people on trains without increasing the number of cars on the road. But since Hitch drivers do get some money from carpooling passengers, it’s possible that this could ultimately encourage more people to drive home in the first place, increasing road congestion and probably worsening China’s already-pretty-dire smog problems.

Either way, the Hitch service is unlikely to make a big impact this holiday – the upgrade that allows for long-distance carpooling is still relatively recent and it’s likely something many people haven’t even considered. Train tickets for this year’s holiday have already gone on sale, and trains are expected to be as tightly-packed as any.

Still, if you want to avoid the sardine-can treatment, carpooling features from ridesharing apps like Didi might be a good option. (Uber also offers a carpooling service in China, but it’s new and geographically limited, so you might have to wait until next year to make use of that for your Spring Festival travels.)