Abstract
The rapid development of the high-speed rail (HSR) network in China has compressed intercity rail travel times. However, what is contentious is whether the expansion of HSR network has created a landscape of uneven accessibility, i.e. producing winners and losers regarding cities’ changing ability to access to the others. This paper uses the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) – one of the most populous and developed mega-regions with the high dense HSR network in China – as a case study to examine accessibility restructuring and major geographical features of winners and losers through a longitudinal comparison before and after the development of the HSR network. Analytical results show that the introduction of the HSR service network has exacerbated the uneven pattern of network accessibility formed by the conventional rail (CR) network. Aside from increased train speeds, intercity travel makes time savings thanks to significant rail distance deductions in the change from CR to HSR services because HSR needs a straighter trajectory, which is usually ignored in the literature. ‘Winner’ cities are either privileged substantially by a much higher quality of HSR service or a much shorter network rail distance. HSR cities can also lose out due to a large increase in network rail distance and a low quality of HSR service. Except for a few CR cities which neighbor HSR stations, thus winning an above average change, most CR cities are disadvantaged as a result of HSR network development. This paper extends the speed-dominated understanding of accessibility change from the network perspective of HSR services.
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Notes
The data was derived from www.12306.com (accessed 24 October 2016) and 2007 version of train timetable (18 April 2007), China. We built the intercity train network in the GIS environment based on the timetable of intercity direct train services. All city-pairs that have direct train services in both 2007 and 2016 were selected.
The HSR service was also first introduced on 18 April 2007 after the sixth speed-up campaign in China. In the YRD, a few D-titled trains were introduced and operated on the upgraded CR track of Jing-Hu line’s Nanjing-Shanghai section. Due to its operating speed less than 200 km/h, most studies regarded the trains as quasi-HSR services. It was not until April 2008 that the first newly built intercity HSR line in the YRD was operated between Nanjing and Hefei. We chose the most recent timetable before the newly built HSR lines to control the variable of operation speeds for CR trains in the pre-HSR era and the HSR era. we chose to overlook the HSR trains on the upgraded CR lines with a few numbers of train services, and thus treating the 18 April 2007as the pre-HSR era.
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Funding
This study was funded by Hallsworth Research Fellowship Fund (Chinese Political Economy) at the University of Manchester and Shanghai Philosophy and Social Sciences Fund (2018ECK009), as well as Major Projects of Humanities and Social Sciences Key Research Base of Ministry of Education (17JJD790007).
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Wang, L., Zhang, W. & Duan, X. Understanding Accessibility Changes from the Development of a High-Speed Rail Network in the Yangtze River Delta, China: Speed Increases and Distance Deductions. Appl. Spatial Analysis 12, 1011–1029 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-019-09305-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-019-09305-7