Transportation
Hohhot lies on the Jingbao Railway from Beijing to Baotou, and is served by two railway stations: Hohhot Station and Hohhot East Station. Trains to Beijing link to destinations to the south and the northeast. The most prominent rail link with Beijing is the overnight K90 train, which has served the Hohhot-Beijing line since the 1980s and is referred to colloquially as the "9-0". Westbound trains go through Baotou and Lanzhou. There are also rail links to most major Inner Mongolian cities and to Ulaanbaatar. Because the quickest trip from Beijing takes around eight and a half hours despite the close distance of the cities, plans for high-speed rail has been discussed for years, and construction of the new high speed railway station began in 2008. The station was completed in 2011 and services 4 slow speed lines, with the high speed lines slated for opening sometime in 2013.
Hohhot's Baita International Airport (IATA:HET) is about 8km from the city centre by car. It has direct flights to Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Wuhan, Hong Kong etc., and to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Long distance buses connect Hohhot to outlying counties, the cities of Baotou, Wuhai, Ordos, and other areas in Inner Mongolia.
The city's public transit system is composed of nearly one hundred bus routes and a large fleet of taxicabs, which are normally green or blue. The bus fare is 1 yuan. The taxi fare begins at 6 yuan.
Hohhot's major north-south thoroughfares are called "Lu" and its east-west thoroughfares are called "Jie". This is roughly equivalent to dividing roads into "street" and "avenue" designation according to direction, a practice used in some North American cities. The largest elevated interchange is near the site of the city's Drum Tower, after which it is named. Several major streets are named after Inner Mongolian leagues; among these, Hulun Buir, Xilin Gol and Xing'an run north-south, while Ulan Chaab runs east-west.
An expressway built in 1997 links Hohhot with Baotou, then known as the Hubao Expressway. In recent years this expressway has been expanded eastwards to Ulaan Chab and Zhangjiakou, and onto Beijing as part of the Jingzang Expressway. The city is en route of China National Highway 110, which runs from Yinchuan to Beijing. China National Highway 209 begins in Hohhot and is southbound towards southern China, with its southern terminus in Guangxi. Hohhot is connected to its northern counties through the Huwu Highway, which was completed in 2006. Previously travel to the northern counties consisted of lengthy navigation through mountainous terrain.
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