China's Traffic Management Bureau Issues Mid-Autumn and National Day Holiday Road Safety Advisory

Key points

• The Mid-Autumn and National Day holidays fall back-to-back, with some people combining leave days; long-distance cross-province tours, autumn self-driving trips, social-media hotspot visits, and red-tourism routes overlap with return-home and family-visit flows.
• Expressways are toll-free for passenger cars with seven seats or fewer during the National Day holiday, with volumes surging above normal levels; tidal traffic flows are expected on expressways in and out of major city clusters including the Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, and Chengdu-Chongqing.
• Tight holiday schedules can encourage speeding and fatigued driving, while more gatherings raise the risk of drink-driving and drunk-driving accidents.
• After the Autumn Equinox, farm work is busy and short-term agricultural and migrant workers move frequently across townships and counties; illegal passenger carrying by trucks, tractors, pickup trucks, and tricycles, and overloading of minibuses, are prone to occur.
• During the holiday, cold and warm air masses alternate frequently, with rain and patchy fog common in some areas; slippery roads and reduced visibility can easily trigger multi-vehicle pileups.
• The bureau advises maintaining safe distance and speed on expressways, changing lanes and slowing down early when exiting, not using the emergency lane when traffic queues, and after a breakdown or accident remembering: pull over, turn on hazard lights, evacuate people, set warnings, and call police promptly.