China's bullet trains make five billion trips

There have been more than 5 billion passenger trips on China's world-renowned bullet trains in eight years, according to new data from the national rail operator. Since its debut in 2008, China's high-speed railway has seen an average annual growth of over 30 percent in passenger trips, the China Railway Corporation said on Thursday, the day after China announced plans to double its length of HSR by 2025.

In 2015 alone, over 1.1 billion trips were made on bullet trains in China, representing more than 45 percent of the country's total railway passenger delivery.

For a nation as large and populous as China, the HSR is charged with overcoming the "bottleneck" in the development of the railway, which is vital for mass transportation, said transportation expert Gu Zhongyuan.