World’s largest land border-crossing hub opens between Hong Kong and Shenzhen

With a total floor area of 689,700 m² across nine levels, Huanggang is the world’s largest land border crossing housed in a single building. Designed to accommodate 200,000 passengers and 15,000 vehicles daily, the complex combines border clearance facilities with a multimodal transport hub.

Huanggang is one of nine land border crossings between Hong Kong and Mainland China. It stands out both for its scale and its continuous operation: it is the only land border crossing dedicated to passenger traffic to operate 24 hours a day.

SYSTRA’s expertise supporting a major transport hub

Working alongside lead architect Aedas, SYSTRA Hong Kong provided comprehensive transport planning and traffic engineering consultancy services, from the early design stages through construction.

One of the main challenges was to manage very different types of passenger and vehicle flows within a single building: pedestrians crossing the border, public transport passengers, private vehicles and cross-boundary coaches. The project also required careful coordination between areas designated for border controls by the Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese authorities and spaces accessible to the public, while ensuring seamless connections between different modes of transport.

In this context, SYSTRA’s teams contributed to the planning of the underground Public Transport Interchange (PTI), the organisation of traffic flows around vehicle border clearance facilities, and the integration of the complex into Hong Kong’s wider transport network.

The interchange provides dedicated areas for buses, minibuses, taxis, and cross-boundary coaches. Directly accessible from the border-crossing areas, it allows passengers to reach their onward transport without leaving the building, through sheltered walkways and circulation routes designed to accommodate different passenger flows.