Didi’s Inter-City Hitch buckles up for an expected 33 million trips over Spring Festival

Didi Chuxing, China’s ride-sharing giant, expects its Inter-City Hitch service to complete over 33 million passenger trips during the approaching Spring Festival—three times higher than the passenger load from the last two years combined.

The annual travel rush around Spring Festival, Chunyun (春运), puts the country ‘s transport system to the ultimate test. This year, an estimated 3 billion passenger trips will take place by road, rail, air, and waterways during Chunyun.

Launched in September 2015, Didi Inter-City Hitch started as a carpool service in the Didi ride-sharing app, which uses AI-based algorithms to match car-owners with passengers who are traveling along similar commuting routes. Didi has been expanding its inter-city hitch service networks from cities to smaller townships in the past year.

Didi urban transportation solution

Today, Didi also announced the launch of its smart city traffic management solution—nicknamed “Didi Smart Transportation Brain”.

The innovative solution integrates Didi’s traffic big data with the local data resources provided by the government and its business partners to enable real-time data analysis using on cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

The company said Didi’s Smart Transportation Brain project aims tackle China’s traffic efficiency problem through infrastructural solutions and traffic flow measurements such as smart traffic lights and reversible lanes. As of now, Didi has implemented its smart traffic signals at over 1280 road intersections across the country and there are currently two reversible lanes in full operation.