Abstract
This study analyzes the structure of China’s overall railway transport network and its sub-networks of conventional railway and high-speed railway, with the aim to understand the country’s economic spatial structure that is reflected by or underlines the railway transport network. First, the results indicate that compared with developed cities, backward cities not only have fewer train services but also lack a symmetrical transport plan; backward cities tend to connect with developed cities rather than within themselves. Second, the national-level urban hierarchy was established using the proposed algorithm, which helped reveal the economic geography of three economic plates in China. Third, the law of the primate city is not prominent in a large country such as China, which is undergoing regional restructuring with the economic center of gravity shifting to the coastal area while also moving south.
Highlights
Economic spatial structure has always been a hot research topic
These studies fall into three classifications: (i) those focusing on the structure of the railway transport network [25,26]; this type of research aims to analyze how the characteristics of the railway network change during its upgrade, and the frequently used indices includes the alpha index, gamma index, beta index, and the diameter of the network; (ii) studies focusing on how railway upgrading impacts the accessibility or connectivity of cities or regions; high-speed railway (HSR) can improve accessibility to the areas along the line, but its degree of influence varies with the location, scale, and basis of development of a given region or city [27,28,29]; (iii) the third line of research focuses on how HSR impacts regional economic development [30,31]; there is still no consensus
We conclude here that the importance of cities in northern and western China exhibited a downward trend from conventional railway (CR) to HSR, which indicates that China’s economic center of gravity is shifting to coastal areas while moving south
Summary
Economic spatial structure has always been a hot research topic. The classic location theory of von Thünen and Weber, the growth pole theory, the trickle-down theory, the spatial interaction theory, and the “core–periphery” theory proposed by the middle of the 20th century all explore the spatial structure from the perspective of inter-regional interaction [1,2,3]. The development of transportation technology will shorten the travel time between cities, lead to changes in the relative location structure between cities [5,6,7,8], and have an impact on the economic spatial restructuring [9,10,11]. The railway transport network structure composed of the conventional railway (CR) and HSR can provide a new and important way to understand the economic spatial structure of a country. 2008, as the Beijing Olympics were about to be held, the Beijing–Tianjin intercity railway, with a design speed of 350 km/h, began operation This marked China’s entry into the era of HSR. We analyzed the characteristics of China’s railway transport network, and based on this, we further identified the economic spatial structure through a new computational algorithm. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 summarizes the literature concerning the HSR and economic spatial structure; Section 3 presents the data and the methods used; in Section 4, we discuss the characteristics of China’s railway transport network; Section 5 analyzes the economic spatial structure based on railway transport network; Sections 6 and 7 conclude and discuss this study
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