Interaction between URT and Urban Spatial Structure

Abstract

During the rapid development of urbanization, many huge cities are in the sensitive period that adjustment of urban spatial structure should be brought about with transport. Through dissecting Shanghai URT's development process, the interaction between URT and urban spatial structure is focused on in this paper. On the one hand, URT and urban spatial development form are mutual restricted; on the other hand, URT will promote the benign development of urban space, to form a layout of bead-shaped radial axis, and to avoid the negative overspread of a pie-type mode. For the oversize cities (such as Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, etc) with strong economic power, after completing of URT' network layout in central areas, traditional mindset of transport planning should be changed, and the mode of TOD (Transit Oriented Development) should be adopt, thereby to achieve the object of coordinate development between a URT's network and a urban spatial structure in a city. Road area capita is lower in many major cities of our country, and service level of road is far below the traffic demand of motor vehicles. With a rapid growth of ownership of urban motor vehicles, traffic jams in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Wuhan and other major cities got worse. During 2010 in Beijing, the heavy congestions on Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day showed a warning sign that Beijing's road system serviceability couldn't afford the rush hour traffic demand. Therefore, developing of public transport, especially the URT (urban rail transit) system with features of mass transit, high speed and high efficiency, is the inevitable choice of solving major cities' traffic problems, and has showed a principal measure to form a perfect urban spatial structure with lower traffic congestion under the condition of limited urban land and transport resource. URT is safe, reliable, fast, and low-pollution. Due to the characteristics of high volume, fast and timely, it can provide the good accessibility of areas along the line and ensures people to travel further in as short as possible time. In other hand, it provides a strong transport support for the adjustment of the major cities' space layout and the expansion of urban built-up areas. Evolution of urban spatial form is the incorporated evolution of land and transport. Reference from the valuable experiences of development of urbanization