Analysis of Railway Network Accessibility in the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration Based on Space Syntax

Abstract

The study abstracts the 26 main cities of urban agglomeration in Yangtze River Delta as convex space, and constructs a convex drawing based on the passenger railway network of 2008, 2018, and 2030 in Yangtze River Delta with Depthmap. After calculating the network integration and intelligibility, the relationship between the development of the railway network and the spatial structure change of urban agglomeration in the Yangtze River Delta are analysed and it finds that: (1) The development of the ordinary railway network is relatively slow and uncoordinated, while the high-speed railway network is developing rapidly and co-ordinately. (2) The spatial layout of railway network accessibility develops from the circle structure to the point-axis structure, and then to the multi-core structure. As a whole, the overall network development becomes increasingly mature and balanced, but the small-scale networks of local area become more differentiated. (3) As the development of multiple cores, the network accessibility has changed from low-level equilibrium period to an unbalanced period and then to a high-level equilibrium period.