Midsummer is here again and the four-day Dragon Boat Festival long weekend starts Thursday. Many Taiwanese will be heading back to their parents'' or grandparents'' homes to relax with family. Freeway officials warn that big traffic jams are to be expected, especially southbound traffic on National Freeway No. 5 on Thursday. If you want to head off traffic, consider leaving early in the morning. To encourage early birds, freeway tolls will be waived from midnight until 5 a.m.
Dragon Boat Festival is here. Hotels in Hualien and Taitung long ago got booked up for the four days’ public holiday. The Freeway Bureau is expecting massive jams of holiday-makers on Thursday, to rival the traffic around Lunar New Year. National Freeway No. 5, which runs from Taipei to Yilan, will be head-to-tail with cars from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m., say officials, with five to seven times more vehicles on the road than normal.
Tsai Ming-che
Freeway Bureau
National Freeway No. 5 is a very important route for holiday-makers. We’ve studied the data provided by the Tourism Bureau. At the peak of the public holiday, Hualien hotels are more than 90% booked up. We think that Freeway No. 5 could well be clogged up with traffic for a long time.
Nationwide, officials say there’ll be 50% to 100% more cars on the roads.
Tsai Ming-che
Freeway Bureau
Over the four days, the highest volume of traffic, and the highest volume heading south, will be on the first day, Thursday, with up to 1.2 million kilometers driven. That will gradually drop over the following days, but overall it will still be about 50% higher than the average.
Heavy traffic controls will be put in place on the freeways. Tolls will be suspended in the night and early morning, so travelers can drive for free, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday from midnight to 5 a.m., and on Sunday from midnight to 10 a.m. Officials hope that will entice some to get up early and beat the traffic.
In a nod to epidemic control, the high-speed rail system has adopted spaced seating on all trains from Wednesday to Sunday, making tickets literally few and far between. On Wednesday, officials announced two extra southbound services, in the afternoon and evening. Meanwhile TRA has scheduled four extra services on some days, tickets for which went on sale in the early hours of Wednesday.
