Title: Impact of High-speed Railway on Spatial Pattern of Chinese Cities' Accessibility
Abstract: Railway is an important way of transportation to combine Chinese cities, and its upgrading plays an important role in improving spatial pattern of cities′ accessibility. Having selected prefecture-level cities as study objects and extracted the shortest-time distances between every two central cites based on data from train schedule, the article calculated the accessibility of 31 central cities by employing the indicator of average accessibility, and analyzed the impact of high-speed railway on central cities′ accessibility. Then the daily communication areas of 31 central cities are abstrcted and the effects of high-speed railway is explored. What′ s more, five cities were selected—Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan and Chongqing as typical cases to analyze factors which influenced their spatial patterns of daily communication areas. Results are shown as follows. 1) The accessibility of central city is closely related to spatial location and external traffic condition of the city. 2) High-speed railway network has promoted the accessibility of all central cities, but different city has different improved degree of accessibility under the influence of city′ s spatial location and construction condition of high-speed railway. 3) The impact of high-speed railway on expanding daily communication areas of Chinese cities is significant and it distributes in the east, middle and west zones. Meanwhile, the number of prefecture-level cities covered by daily communication areas is increasing, and these cities are covered by more central cities′ daily communication areas in urban populated areas. 4) The expansion of central city′ s daily communication area is in step with the layout of high-speed railway. Besides, the superior geographic position will be beneficial to the expansion of central city′ s daily communication area, but terrain and water and other geographical barriers will limit its expansion on different direction. 5) The impact of high-speed railway is gradually catching up and will surpass the impact of city′ s spatial location on improving cities′ accessibility.
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 14
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