The Study Of Excess Commuting Of Large Cities In Western China

Being two major types of the urban land use, residential land and employment land have important impact on urban structure. The spatial distribution and relationship between residential land and employment land have great influence on urban transportation. As the front area of the research of urban structure, the study of relationship between residential land and employment land is becoming one of the hot topics in the field of urban economics, urban geography and urban planning.Since the reform and opening up, with the deepening reform of urban land and housing market, the process of rapid suburbanization and urban sprawl as well as the disintegration of danwei institution, dramatic changes have taken place on jobs-housing spatial organization in big cities of China, jobs-housing spatial separation and mismatch becomes more acute since the dismantling of danwei system that favored mixed land use patterns, which have already led to transportation problem and changes of urban commuting pattern.Excess commuting is the additional journey-to-work travel represented by the difference between the actual observed average commute and the theoretical minimum average commute, given the spatial configuration of workplace and residential sites. Research on excess commuting has been carried out over the last30years since the seminal contribution of Hamilton. Since its proposal in the1980s, it has stimulated a great volume of empirical studies on measuring and evaluating the urban commuting efficiency in western cities and has been considered as a strategic useful tool for addressing transport and planning policies with respect to the jobs-housing balance, environmental and other social issues. Similar phenomena of home-work separation and traffic congestion in Chinese cities have also attracted increasing attention from scholars, but the study of excess commuting is still at an initial stage in China. Therefore, based on the study of the excess commuting in western countries, the paper started an empirical study for large cities in western China and elaborated the reason of excess commuting in China, so that some useful advances can be provided for the optimization of urban structure and urban sustainable development.This dissertation is divided into seven chapters. Chapter one is the index and chapter two is the overview of literatures as well as most up to date research progress. Chapter three is the discourses of basic theory of excess commuting and hypothesis. Chapters four to six are the empirical research results and hypothesis testing; chapter seven is the conclusion of the paper.Base on the previous research, this study has six main findings:(1) According to the empirical studies of Chengdu and Lanzhou, the characteristics of resident commuting in large cities of western China are as following:①Public transportation is the major commuting style and the percentage of private car driving is also high. The contradiction between supply and demand of transportation has become increasingly prominent.②Most of the residents travel less than half an hour and the problem of the separation between jobs and residential locations is not that critical as in big cities of eastern China.③Urban structure effect the commuting space. Our study shows that, as a multi-center city, Lanzhou has less traffic pressure in downtown area than Chengdu which is a single-central city.④The rapid development of large cities in western China has a significant impact on resident commuting.(2) Excess commuting is an important criterion by which to judge the urban commuting efficiency. By comparison of the difference of excess commuting between Chengdu and Lanzhou, it shows that multi-center city has a shorter commuting distance and higher commuting efficiency than the single-center city on the condition of jobs-housing balance. Compared with the single-center city, implementation of jobs-housing balance policy will obtain better results and reduce commuting and traffic jam more effectively in the multi-center city.(3) Both the actual observed average commuting distance and the theoretical minimum average commuting distance in large cities of western China are shorter than that in large cities of Europe and the US, but the commuting efficiency is higher than big cities in USA but lower than big cities in European, such as England and Poland. The large cities of western China have shorter commuting distance, but a closer commuting efficiency, compared to big cities of eastern China. This indicates that, the separation between jobs and residential locations is significantly increased and commuting efficiency is decreasing in large cities of western China during the huge city developing.(4) The empirical research shows that, there’s no difference of commuting distances between male and female. But there’s difference between people who has different age, education, income, job and property type. It shows that urban space has formed a structural impediment that constrains the disadvantaged people’s ability to commuting, information search, migration, which affects the opportunities of jobs and housing. The spatial mismatch hypothesis in western countries highlights the requirement for urban geographers to pay attention to the extent of spatial inequality in big cities of China.(5) By comparison of the difference of excess commuting among different job and property type, the main findings as following:state-owned enterprise and institution commuters have shorter actual observed average commuting distance and less excess commuting than joint ventures and private enterprises commuters; the residents in danwei communities have shorter actual observed average commuting distance and higher commuting efficiency than the residents in commercial housing. It shows that, under the planned economy system, the danwei communities optimized the jobs-housing spatial structure and formed a jobs-housing balance. Although danwei system has been disintegrated, danwei communities still exist in the cities of China and play an important role in keeping jobs-housing balance.(6) Jobs-housing balance is a planning idea formed in the process of western urban planners fighting with city illness, but there is much debate on its effectiveness of reducing commuting. By the correlation analysis between actual observed average commute and the theoretical minimum average commute of big cities at home and abroad, it shows that jobs-housing balance helps to reduce commuting travel, but the implementation effect has a discrepancy among different cities.