Abstract
As the world’s highest railway, and the longest highland railway, the Qinghai–Tibet Railway (QTR) has been paid considerable attention by researchers. However, most attention has been paid to the ecological and environmental issues affecting it, and sustainable ecological, social, and economic development-related studies of the QTR are rare. In this study, by analyzing the passenger traffic, freight traffic, passenger-kilometers, and freight-kilometers of the QTR for the period 1982–2013 and the transport structure of the Tibetan Plateau (TP) for 1990–2013, the evolutionary process of the transport system in the TP following the construction of the QTR has been revealed. Subsequently, by comparing Gross Domestic Product (GDP), population, industrial structure, and urbanization level at the county and 1 km scales between surrounding and non-surrounding areas of the QTR, the differences in socioeconomic performance before and after its construction were detected. The results show that (1) in the TP, the highway-dominated transport system will break up and an integrated and sustainable transport system will form; (2) at the county scale, the annual growth rates of GDP of counties surrounding the QTR were greater than those of non-surrounding counties for the period 2000–2010. At the 1 km scale, following the opening of the completed line, the GDP of surrounding areas had a greater growth rate than before; (3) analysis at the county and 1 km scales indicated that population was not aggregated into the surrounding areas of the QTR in the period 2000–2010; (4) in terms of industrial structure, the proportion of primary industry decreased continuously, while the proportion of secondary and tertiary industries increased overall in the period 1984–2012. The QTR had no obvious impact on changes in the urbanization level of its surrounding areas.
Highlights
The report published by the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) proposed the concept of sustainable development [1]—a process that includes, amongst other factors, the development of sustainable transport to provide accessible, safe, environmentally friendly and affordable transport systems [2,3]
Some studies show that the floating population is becoming the major power for accelerating urbanization in modern times, and it is estimated that temporary residents may account for about half of the urban population in Tibet [47]
Our results indicate that the influences of the Qinghai–Tibet Railway (QTR) on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of its surrounding areas are obvious, which is consistent with the results of Wang and Wu [25]
Summary
The report published by the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) proposed the concept of sustainable development [1]—a process that includes, amongst other factors, the development of sustainable transport to provide accessible, safe, environmentally friendly and affordable transport systems [2,3]. Railway transport can influence regional development by reducing transportation costs and travel time [7,8], improving accessibility [9,10], and increasing the overall competitiveness of the system [11,12,13], especially for freight transport [9]. Wang and Jin [14] analyzed the evolution of the railway network, the changes in accessibility, and the relationship between the railway network distribution and spatial economic growth in the past one hundred years in China, and found that the construction of railways led to time–space convergence [14], by which places separated by great distances are brought closer together in terms of the time taken to travel between them. Bullet trains can facilitate social cohesion [13] and mitigate the cost of megacity growth [12]
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