2288 - Intercity Transportation's Role in Affecting Distal Area's Urbanization/Green Coverage – a High-Speed Rail's Case in Urban Land Teleconnections

Abstract

Background The urban land teleconnections’ (ULT) research is emerging largely due to more local urbanization being attributable to distal land demand. The knowledge on ULT and how ULT is driven by transportation is significant because urban growth or shrinkage, and green coverage probably sets the city's foundation of natural, healthy living settings. However, transportation's role in driving ULT is barely studied. This study aims to contribute to the theoretical role of intercity transportation in the ULT arena, and to explore empirically the spatial pattern of high-speed rail (HSR) trips, as well as to probe HSR's impact on ULT. Methods The 2007 inaugurated Taiwan HSR (THSR) is selected for this study. The data sources include the THSR ticket database, a THSR passenger survey, the employment and population databases, and the United States Geological Survey/USGS's free 30-meter resolution Landsat satellite images. The primary analysis tools include descriptive statistics, spatial analysis, and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). Results Theoretically, the intercity transportation may play as a necessity factor in driving ULT; while the local attractiveness factors play the sufficiency roles. The ULT land is used for producing products or services for distant needs, for which transportation is required to ship inbound remote passengers or companies and outbound products and services, which are materialized as trips. Hence, traffic data have the potential to depict teleconnection. Furthermore, different trips/activities likely affect land consumption differently, and different intercity transportation modes likely affect distal land consumption differently. The preliminary empirical analysis on the green land coverage shows that ULT phenomenon seems existing in Taiwan based on the mismatched spatial distributions of incremental population and the loss of green coverage between 2006-11. This finding could be the joint result of the tourism attraction of the Eastern counties and the elevated accessibility to tourists/population due to the new intercity transportation infrastructure. A two-level green coverage HLM model shows that at the regional level, the increased employment accessibility brought by the THSR for a town/district is statistically significant (p=0.05) in reducing its green coverage. At the local level, the closer a town/district is to an HSR station; the higher its green coverage is reduced. Conclusions The preliminary policy implications include precautious planning for potential increasing land demand from distant areas and the reduction in green coverage and collecting taxes from the distant land demand consumers to cope for these impacts of the tele-connected land demand.