High-Speed Railways and Urban Networks in China

Abstract

Worldwide, High-Speed Railway (HSR) networks have been developed intensely over the last few decades, such as Tokyo-Osaka, the first HSR corridor in Japan, the TGV in France and the ICE in Germany. HSR has also experienced exponential growth in China so that currently China’s HSR networks are the largest in the world. Meanwhile, China’s spatial development has experienced rapid urbanization. In general, the appearance of HSR tends to reduce passenger travel cost in time and to extend the interacting economic and social relationships of cities on a larger spatial scale. Therefore, as one of the new high-speed transportation linkages in urban networks, HSR could strongly interact with other components of urban networks (nodes, links, flows) for different functional activities. Three dimensions of these interacting relationships can be identified: the configuration of urban networks (city nodes and links) in HSR networks, HSR’s interacting relationships with other high-speed transportation linkages in urban networks, and intra-city travel of HSR passengers flows to/from HSR stations in urban networks. It is a very typical situation that China’s HSR networks have been developed in parallel with a fast urbanization process, especially with the consideration of future integration with Euro-Asian urban networks through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Due to differences in economic, cultural, political and institutional situations, the interacting relationships between HSR and urban networks in China may differ from the cases in other HSR countries. Therefore, knowledge on the consequences of the interaction between HSR and urban networks in China is urgently needed. The relevant answers to the three interactions between HSR and urban networks are pertinent to the development of HSR networks in China and other HSR countries that plan to develop HSR networks on a large scale. In this research, an empirical analysis is conducted to demonstrate the interacting relationships between HSR and the relevant components of urban networks in the context of China. The datasets used in this dissertation include three main resources: aggregated HSR origin/destination (O/D) flow data, aggregated air O/D flow data, and disaggregated HSR passenger survey data. With the application of network analysis and regression models (multiple linear model, panel model and multinomial logit model), the goal of this research is first to understand the relationships between HSR networks, airline networks and Chinese urban networks at macro level, and second, to understand the impact of HSR stations on intra-city mode choices at micro level.