Open Geosci. 2019; 11:804–814 Research Article Wuyang Hong* and Mo Su Influence of Rapid Transit on Accessibility Pattern and Economic Linkage at Urban Agglomeration Scale in China https://doi.org/10.1515/geo-2019-0062 tion infrastructures and modes, including that of HSR, and Received May 02, 2018; accepted Mar 19, 2019 as such, it is an index that evaluates transportation net- works and traffic locations. Scholars have conducted nu- Abstract: The development of high-speed railways has merous studies on the effects of HSR since the first one become an important factor influencing regional pattern went into operation in Japan in 1964. One of the dominant changes in China. In this study, an accessibility evalua- issues in those studies is that of the influence/impact of tion model was constructed in combination with regional HSR. Scholars focus their studies on space block, space scale and regional center city to research the effect of high- effect, and chance opportunity accumulation to build ac- speed rails on accessibility in the South Jiangsu, an urban cessibility models [1], as they contend that HSR improves agglomeration in China. Based on accessibility index, ur- accessibility to node cities and produces a space recon- ban economic and social statistics data were used in con- struction effect by connecting cities and regions, having junction with a gravity model to analyze the character- maximum impact on a large-scale [2]. Research on the istics and evolvement of economic relations in this area. Japanese Shinkansen [3], the French TGV [4], and the Ger- The result shows that high-speed rails improve overall re- man ICE HSR [5] demonstrates that HSR significantly im- gional accessibility, significantly benefit regions along rail proves regional traffic conditions and greatly satisfies the lines, and makes middle- and long-distance journeys more demands of current and potential travel. HSR causes a convenient for the general public. High-speed rails play a mass-scale space-time contraction effect that promotes hu- particularly dominant role in the evolution of economic man mobility and gradually increases regional accessibil- linkage and effectively strengthen the ties between cities. ity [6], significantly impacting regional interactions, urban When the bonds between cities along rail lines greatly im- economic development, and the evolution of the regional prove, a basic framework of economic relations is formed. landscape [7]. Finally this paper discusses the imbalance arising from The Chinese HSR is a latecomer relative to other the effect of high-speed rails, proposing such suggestions countries [8]. There have been several studies of HSR in as improving urban traffic and building expressways that China [9], with domestic research dating back to 1994 connect high-speed rail stations in marginal areas to im- when Qi [10], among other studies, presented qualitative prove accessibility. discussions regarding the predictive effects on the econ- Keywords: high-speed rail; accessibility; economic link- omy and the environment with respect to noise when con- age; urban agglomeration; China structing HSR. Jiang et al. [11] conducted a case study of the Shanghai-Nanjing HSR, while Zhou and Yu [12] studied the Beijing-Guangzhou and Beijing-Shanghai lines. These 1 Introduction studies researched the influence mechanism produced by HSR on the accessibility spatial pattern and analyzed the effect of changes in accessibility on variables of interest The large-scale implementation of High-Speed Rail (HSR) to urban economists. Methodologically, the geometric grid network in China is currently changing accessibility to method and topological method were universally adopted. cities along the HSR line. Accessibility is a classic topic For instance, a timetable-based accessibility evaluation in- and a widely-used concept in studies of various transporta- dex including travel time, travel cost, and distance, was constructed to analyze the impact on railroad network ac- cessibility of HSR [13]. *Corresponding Author: Wuyang Hong: Wuhan University Strengthening traffic accessibility has its most direct Wuhan, China; Email: [email protected] Mo Su: impact on regional development. The European Union, Open Access. © 2019 W. Hong and M. Su, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License Influence of Rapid Transit on Accessibility Pattern and Economic Linkage Ë 805 Japan, America, and China support HSR services because and roads. The data for the railways include data from of their economic, environmental, and quality-of-life ben- lines that had opened prior to the time of the evaluation efits [14]. By the end of 2014, China’s total HSR operating and data from lines that had already established stops mileage exceeded 16,000 kilometers—approximately 50% in South Jiangsu. HSR data include the Beijing-Shanghai of all HSR operating miles worldwide—elevating China to line and the Shanghai-Nanjing and Nanjing-Hangzhou number one with respect to HSR miles. Such success has Intercity Railways. Traditional railway data include the given rise to increased diplomacy to promote the expan- Nanjing-Wuhu Railway, the Nanjing-Qidong Railway, and sion of China’s HSR to neighboring countries in southeast the Shanghai-Nanjing section of the Beijing-Shanghai Rail- and central Asia. The development of HSR has been one way. Roadway data are obtained from the Earth System Sci- of the central features of China’s transport infrastructure ence Data Sharing Platform. policy, especially in economically developed areas. South China’s administrative system is divided into four lev- Jiangsu, typical urban agglomeration in China, has en- els: provincial, prefectural, county and township. The tered the era of high-speed rail and become the epitome county-level administrative region as the statistical unit of of rapid development of HSR. It is appropriate to conduct the China’s GDP,population, industry and other economic research on the effects of HSR. By establishing road traffic and social statistical data plays a connecting role in the databases for 2007 and 2013 and employing a GIS software entire administrative division system. Therefore, this pa- package as basic support, this study proposes an accessi- per chooses county administrative region as the research bility evaluation model, operated on the mesoscale and unit. All the administrative units are abstracted as spatial macro-scale, and uses a gravity model to determine the nodes, and there are 31 county-level research nodes in to- economic link intensity between cities in South Jiangsu. tal (as shown in Figure 1). 2 Study Area and Data Sources 3 Method 2.1 Overview of the Study Area 3.1 Accessibility Model South Jiangsu is one of the highest economically devel- Accessibility is a fundamental concept in transportation re- oped areas in China, reporting one of the highest GDP per search and planning [15, 16]. It is defined and explained capita rates in the country. It is located in the southern in several ways; such well-known definitions are: ‘the po- part of Jiangsu Province, in the core area of the econom- tential of opportunities for interaction’ [17] and ‘the ease ically developed Yangtze River delta which is one of six with which activities may be reached from a given location large world-class city clusters. South Jiangsu comprises using a particular transportation system’ [18]. Yet, most Nanjing, Suzhou, Wuxi, Changzhou, and Zhenjiang. The calculated accessibility indices are not panaceas that can urbanization level of South Jiangsu has surpassed 70%, measure every aspect of accessibility [19, 20]. As the most which means that more than 70% of the population lives basic method of accessibility evaluation, distance mea- in urban areas. The per capita GDP reached 16,000 dollars sure is generally converted to time cost for direct analy- in 2013, which approaches that of the level of developed sis. In this study, an accessibility model was built from a countries. In the beginning of 2008, the Beijing-Shanghai regional and metropolitan point of view. At the regional HSR and the Shanghai-Nanjing HSR were under construc- level, accessibility refers to the time cost of travel between tion, while construction began in December 2008 on the two urban nodes (with the vector-raster analysis method, Nanjing-Hangzhou and Nanjing-Anhui Intercity Railways accessibility is expressed as the average of the spatial dis- (see Figure 1). tance, time distance, and economic distance); at the cen- tral city level, accessibility refers to the time cost of travel from each urban node to a specified metropolis (with the 2.2 Data Sources cost-weighted raster algorithm, accessibility is expressed as the time distance). High-speed and traditional railways as well as the high- way were selected as the essential data sources for the evaluation of accessibility. HSR transportation extends ac- cess to areas previously available by traditional railway 806 Ë W. Hong and M. Su Figure 1: HSR network in South Jiangsu Table 1: Relative time cost of different types of grids Types Design Running Time Types Design Running Time speed speed costs speed speed costs (km/h) (km/h) (min) (km/h) (km/h) (min) HSR 350 200 3 Third-class road 30 25 24 Traditional railway – 150 4 Fourth-class road – 20 30 Expressway 120 100 6 Land without road – 15 40 First-class road 100 75 8 Water area – – 600 Second-class road 60 50 12 No data – – – 3.1.1 Accessibility Model at Regional Scale ity of the urban node may be expressed as the average ob- tained, which is calculated as: Spatial distance accessibility n , X Li = lij (n − 1) (1) To construct a vector-based road network dataset, the clos- j=1 est facility analysis method is used to seek n-1 shortest where, Li refers to the spatial distance-based accessibility paths from the administrative station of a research unit of urban node i, lij refers to the shortest distance between to other administrative stations.