The Distribution Pattern of the Railway Network in China at the County Level

Abstract

Evaluation of the railway network distribution and its impacts on social and economic development has great significance for building an efficient and comprehensive railway system. To address the lack of evaluation indicators to assess the railway network distribution pattern at the macro scale, this study selects eight indicators-railway network density, railway network proximity, the shortest travel time, train frequency, population, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the gross industrial value above designated size, and fixed asset investment-as the basis of an integrated railway network distribution index which is used to characterize China's railway network distribution using geographical information system (GIS) technology. The research shows that, in 2015, the railway network distribution was low in almost half of China's counties and that there were obvious differences in distribution between counties in the east and west. In addition, multiple dense areas of railway network distribution were identified. The results suggest that it might be advisable to strengthen the connections between large and small cities in the eastern region and that the major urban agglomerations in the midwest could focus on strengthening the construction of railway facilities to increase the urban vitality of the western region. This study can be used to guide the optimization of railway network structures and provide a macro decision-making reference for the planning and evaluation of major railway projects in China. economics [3,4]. Accessibility has long been a central issue in transport geography and is a commonly used indicator in the field of transportation network analysis, transport planning, and land use [5,6].Accessibility is a popular measure for assessing the overall spatial structure of a transportation network [7]. In 1959, Hansen was the first to define accessibility as the size of the interactions between nodes in a transportation network, and he suggested a method to measure it in metropolitan areas [8].In 1979, Morris stated that accessibility is the means to reach a given activity site from a certain place by a specific transportation system [9]. Since the formation of these definitions, accessibility has been a central theme in transportation studies, and its measurement can be divided into three groups based on function: spatial separation, cumulative opportunity, and spatial interaction measures [10]. The first group involves calculating the topological length, the shortest distance, time, or cost between two nodes [11,12], and only measures the connectivity of the transportation network. The second group focuses on the proximity of cities to development opportunities and involves estimating the size of the population or the scale of the economic activities that can be reached from a node within a certain period of time [13,14]. The third group comprises what are called potential values [15,16].The advantages and disadvantages of the three groups are as follows. The methods of the first group take the cost of th...

Digital Twin and CyberGIS for Improving Connectivity and Measuring the Impact of Infrastructure Construction Planning in Smart Cities

“…Li, Guo [61] investigate the distribution of railways in China using indicators such as network density, proximity, travel time, train frequency, population, and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). They then evaluated China's railway network distribution using GIS.…”

Urban Network Spatial Connection and Structure in China Based on Railway Passenger Flow Big Data

“…This diamond pattern was basically consistent with the T-shaped space that has outlined China's regional development for a long time. Relevant research results based on railway passengers, aviation passenger flow, and Tencent migration data have also proved the universality of this law [5,46,47].…”

“…Transportation has effectively promoted the development and protection of territorial space, coordinated development between urban and rural areas, and also optimized productivity distribution, which plays a basic, strategic, and service role in economic and social development [3]. At the same time, the national construction of high-speed transportation facilities has also gradually accumulated a series of problems, such as the mismatch between the transportation layout and the population and urban layout [4], the exacerbation of the vertical imbalance by construction of expressways and high-speed railways [5], and the unreasonable competition in the construction of regional transportation system [6], which led to the social and economic connections among regions becoming closer and complex. Regional differences, comprehensiveness, and spatial interaction have always been the core content of economic geography and regional economics.…”